Lent 5
Gary Hall
Seabury-Western
March 27, 2007
Years ago when I was in seminary, I heard a cautionary tale from the great Krister Stendahl, my New Testament teacher. Professor Stendahl was going over the instructions for the big exegesis paper which we all had to write for his class, and a student asked him if one could write this exegesis paper without a working knowledge of Greek. Stendahl answered that one could, provided that they did not try to press the English text too hard for meaning. And then he told this story as an example:
In the Revised
Standard Version, the eleventh chapter of John’s Gospel begins this way: “Now
a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister
Martha.” A few years before the class I was in, a student had seized
on the death and raising of Lazarus as the story he wanted to explicate. He did
not know Greek, but he had heard that the RSV was a reliable word-for-word translation. And
so he decided to do a close reading on the text, and the major part of his attention
gravitated to the third word: certain. “Now a certain man
was ill.” This was the 1970s, and with all the mind/body stuff going
on in those days, this student became increasingly convinced that Lazarus’s
illness had something to do with his being too certain. And
so he wrote a 30-page term paper explaining in great detail how the raising
of Lazarus is really a Johannine allegory about ambiguity. Stuck in his certitude,
Lazarus was condemned to die. In raising him, Jesus restored him not only
to health but to open-mindedness.
You can probably
guess that this paper did not receive the highest of grades. As Stendahl
told the story, he seemed both saddened and amused. “The word
the RSV rendered as certain is the Greek particle tis, which means
simply something or someone specific. It doesn’t mean he’s bullheaded.” This
cautionary tale has lived with me for decades, especially when I am in a heated
discussion with a person who believes that King James was a contemporary of Jesus
when he wrote the Bible. You can’t press the English text too
hard.
Nevertheless,
I wish I had that long-ago seminarian’s paper in hand this morning as we
think together about today’s Gospel. In this passage, Jesus addresses
the people in the Jerusalem Temple, and it is clear from the context that he
is not getting too great a hearing. Finally, sounding a bit exasperated,
he remarks,
‘You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world, I am not of
this world. I told you that you would die in your sins, for you will die in your
sins unless you believe that I am he.’–John 8.23-24
This is perhaps one of the saddest interchanges in the New Testament. The people whom Jesus addresses are, well, certain. They are certain that they know God and know how best to serve God. And so they are not open to Jesus and the new life and blessing and freedom that he represents. The pious folks of Jesus’s day thought they knew God, and they were certain that the kind of God incarnated in and talked about by Jesus could not be the same One they knew from their experience. They are certain that they know what they are doing. And it is among other things their perverse certainty that will ultimately bring Jesus to the cross.
I have spent
a good deal of my life being certain about what I stand for. I was raised
in a left-wing democratic household. I entered the church in the 1960s
as a result of my interest and activity in the Civil Rights and anti-war movements. I
have spent most of my life in the church involved in liberal/progressive causes—the
ordination of women, the Nuclear Freeze campaign, full inclusion for gays and
lesbians in the church’s sacramental life. For most of my life,
if you asked me what was the right side of any issue, I could easily tell you: I
have been certain that God is for Civil Rights, against war, and for equality
across gender and sexual orientation boundaries. I still have strong convictions
in those areas, but my comfortable sense of my own certainty is beginning to
erode.
I don’t
know if that’s because of advancing age or because I live and work in
a school. Academic freedom is one of the basic premises of an educational
community, and by academic freedom I mean not only the right of professors
to teach what they teach without fear of reprisal; I also mean the right of
students to question what those professors teach and to hold positions which
their colleagues and instructors do not share. Seminary is or should
be a “certainty-free zone” in the church, a place (unlike a diocesan
or General convention or even a parish) where one can try on and explore different
points of view, a place where different modes of discourse and argumentation
can coexist in a community dedicated to the free exchange and critique of positions
usually held, outside these walls, with inflexible certainty.
You and
I inhabit a church which has always seen itself as “comprehensive”,
that is, which has defined itself as a faith community held together not by
ideology but by our corporate life in Christ. There are many people in
our church who do not see the Gospel’s implications enacted in ways we
would define as liberal or progressive. There are even more people in our church
who have some pretty basic questions about the affirmations we make when we
recite the Creeds. We will serve neither them nor ourselves if we use
seminary as a place merely to reinforce our own certainty—either
of received political orthodoxy or the uncritical repetition of doctrinal language. The
Jesus who addresses his Temple audience in today’s Gospel would have
known how to speak to people beset on all sides by rampaging uncertainty. It
was those who thought they knew everything who gave him the most perfunctory
hearing and so took him to the cross.
Do not get me wrong. God has called us to be passionate advocates of God’s cause in the world. It matters where we stand on theological and justice issues. Following Jesus is not about being so ambiguous that you ultimately stand for nothing. But we can only stand for something when we have let go of our presumptuous claim to be the custodians of unquestioned truth. Seminary is not a time to download all the answers. It is a time to frame the questions. Our aim is so to know and love the One Jesus calls “my Father” that we may call others into that knowledge and love as well. We can only know God as Jesus knew God if we are open to the possibility that things might be other than we always assumed they are. We can only know and love God as Jesus did if we are willing to risk giving up our presumptuous claims to be certain. Amen.