Happy for Jesus

Happy for Jesus--May 29, 2019

[Jesus said:] "I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and will remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. You heard me say to you, 'I am going away, and I am coming to you.' If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I. And now I have told you this before it occurs, so that when it does occur, you may believe." [John 14:25-29]

It is hard to be happy for someone who is leaving--even Jesus.  Maybe especially Jesus.

It is hard, let's just be honest, to be happy over someone's departure if that person is important to you--not because you are cruel and don't wish good things for them, and not because their welfare doesn't matter to you, but exactly because they are important to you.  And selfishly (which, in this case, is a part of being honest with myself), we are fearful of losing the presence that has meant so much for us.  It's like that lyric of Fleetwood Mac: "I've been afraid of changing, 'cause I built my life around you."  

That means we may be more easily able to wish someone well on new adventures if they weren't that close to us in the first place, because they won't leave so much of an empty place in our lives when they are gone--whether they are leaving geographically, or just withdrawing the ways they had been involved in our lives in the past.  Doubly hard is when someone who has been important to you chooses to leave--not because their job made them move across country, or because they needed to go and take care of an ailing relative, or something like that.  It is hard to have someone say to you, "Can't you be happy for me that I'm going onto this new, good thing?" because that carries the double edge of losing the closeness that had been there, as well as sounding like the other person isn't all that bothered about leaving, because they seem excited rather than sorrowful.

And that's just hard to bear--it causes a triple wound: the pain of losing someone you valued, the pain of feeling like you weren't as important to them as they were you (if they are leaving you behind for something else), and the pain of not having that person to lean on to process the first two.  It's hard to be happy, despite our best intentions to be good and kind and polite people in this world, when someone important in your life is leaving that vital space they occupied.

Even if the other person we are asked to be happy for... is Jesus.

I'll admit, this passage from John's gospel is always hard for me, for exactly these reasons.  Jesus tells his closest friends that he is "going away" and that they should be happy for him.  They should "rejoice," he says--and I can't help but hear a layer of guilt added (this may be my issue, rather than Jesus', I'll admit) when he adds in, "if you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father."

That hits all my buttons.  For one, it sounds like Jesus, on whom the disciples had built their lives and for whom they left their jobs, families, and reputations, is now just up and leaving them.  They had dropped their fish nets at the mere calling of their names, and now the one who had called them says he's moving on.  That's hard.

Second, Jesus is excited--and understandably so--to be returning to the Father.  That means he isn't just talking about being separated by death.  He isn't just saying to the disciples, "You know I wish I didn't have to leave, but this cross thing is unavoidable," but it sure sounds like he is saying, "I am tired of being separated from the Father, and there is something I can get from closeness with the Father that I can't get from you." Again that is certainly true: the Source of All Life and the Ground of All Being is surely more fun to hang around than a bunch of dense and barely literate fishermen.  But you know it can't help but feel to Peter, James, John, and the rest like they are chopped liver, and like Jesus had just been slumming it with them as a placeholder until he could get back up into his old spot at the right hand of God in heaven.  I know, I know: Jesus doesn't mean it that way--but it sure must feel that way to the disciples, who had done their very best to give everything they had to Jesus.  

And third of all, to cap it all off, now it sounds like Jesus himself won't be there with them to help them through this loss... because he's the one they're losing.  He had been there with them through lots of other learnings, and he had helped them through.  He helped them understand and adjust when they saw that God loved the outcast and the notorious stinkers as much as the Respectable Religious people, even when that blew their minds. He helped them readjust their worldview when he told them that God's way of saving the world wasn't to kill the Romans but to die at their hands, even though that idea turned their world upside down.  He had helped them understand that death wasn't the worst thing in the world, because he had the power to give life--even though they had learned to be afraid of death.  And through all of those lessons, it had been Jesus who helped his disciples to cope--it was less scary to face whatever the new thing was that he was teaching them, because he was there as the constant.

Now, it sounds not only like Jesus is going, but wants his supposedly closest friends to be happy for him that he is leaving them behind because he's got a better thing going with the Father in heaven than to stay with them.

And yeah, I've got to be honest, it's kind of hard to be happy for Jesus in this moment--even though I wasn't there with those disciples in the upper room that night, and even though I hadn't walked all those years with Jesus, sharing joys and sorrows and unexpected changes in life like they all did.  It's hard for me every year when our church's rhythm of storytelling that we call the lectionary gives us the story of Jesus' ascension into heaven, because, well, because it's hard for me not to hear it as the story of when Jesus left us for a better gig, a cushier spot, or a better relationship.  It's hard to hear Jesus say, "If you loved me, you would be happy for me," and not have it sound like the "It's not you, it's me," speech you get right before being dumped.  And that makes it hard to be happy, even to be happy for Jesus.

I read somewhere a while ago that the reason we human beings fear change so much in our lives is that we are really afraid of loss, and I think that is very much what is going on here, both for the disciples in the upper room, and for me as I read this story.  We are afraid of losing this One on whom we have built our lives, and it is hard to be asked to be happy about losing that relationship.  That explains, too, why the disciples act in such strange ways shortly after this conversation--they are impulsive (like Peter, flying off the handle in the garden and trying to whack someone's ear off, even though he knows that is not Jesus' way); they are confused (because the one solid person in their lives is now bailing on them); and they even run away (because sometimes when it feels like you are being abandoned, you run away first because it hurts less).  The disciples--and I'll own this about myself, too--are afraid of losing the love they have known in Jesus, a love that got them through a million struggles up to this point, and a love they had been counting on to go with them. 

So of course, when Jesus tells the disciples, "Things are going to change between us," it sounds in their ears (and ours) like, "You are going to lose me."  That's exactly what it feels like.

All right, then what are we disciples today supposed to do with all of this?  Is this just an unavoidable word of bad news for us? Is this a time when we are supposed to make ourselves fake a smile and pretend happiness for Jesus while we hold back the tears and swallow the lump in our throat?  Are we just supposed to take this moment as an unavoidable loss?

Well, ok, to be honest (and I think that's what I need here), maybe a piece of this is unavoidably bittersweet--both for the first disciples and for us.  Pretending there will be no heartache in the life of discipleship is theological malpractice, and as the line from The Princess Bride reminds me, "Life is pain, your highness--anyone who says differently is selling something." And for us with Jesus, part of that loss is that I don't get to eat at a table with rabbi Jesus like Peter and Matthew and Nathanael did.  I don't get to hear his voice, or see how he deals with new situations in life.  I don't get to have a conversation with him like I can talk with another person in the room.  I don't know what it's like to see Jesus smile or hear him laugh.  I don't know what it is to seem him nod in approval when I get something right.  All of those things are losses to be grieved because Jesus, the Middle-Eastern, brown-skinned, Aramaic-speaking Jewish rabbi, is not walking the earth like he did for those years in the first century.  And yes, that feels like a loss to me--I would have liked those kinds of experiences that the other disciples got.

But--and this is an important but--Jesus doesn't only seem to think that he is leaving his disciples.  He doesn't see this as good news for him that only comes at the cost of bad news for his friends.  Jesus tells his disciples that he is somehow still going to be present to them, even though he is also "with the Father."  And that has something do with the "Advocate," whom Jesus also names as "the Holy Spirit."  Now on another day, we'll have to flesh out how the Holy Spirit can be different from God and yet also God and distinct from Jesus but also somehow one with Jesus.  But for today, let's just consider that Jesus seems to think that somehow he will be able to be even more present to his friends than before, because of the Spirit.  Somehow, Jesus' going to the Father isn't just happy reunion or a renewed relationship for Jesus, but is also the way Jesus can be with us, present to us, all over the world, all at once.

It was easy, after all, for Jesus to be with "all of his followers" when they would have all fit in a conversion van.  But now, as we are scattered all over God's beloved world, and as we are sent to make more and more disciples, there's no way the human body of one person can be with us all at once.  Instead, by the Spirit, Jesus can be--and is!--truly present to us whether we are walking in his footsteps in Jerusalem, across the ocean in America, or in orbit around the earth on the Space Station.  

Jesus really does mean it as good news for us that he has gone to the Father--it turns out to be his way of being with us more fully.  When we feel ourselves tensing up at the idea of losing this One who has breathed our air and broken bread at table with the likes of Peter and John and Philip, maybe we can stop and be honest with ourselves: we are afraid of the change, because we are afraid of losing the love we have known.  And yet Jesus still offers himself to us in a way that was not even possible when he was walking the dusty roads of Galilee.  

Honesty is the key that lets us hear good news: yes, it feels like a loss, and it seems scary, to consider that Jesus "went away" to be with the Father.  And once we have owned that our fear about the change is really fear about loss, we can bring that to Jesus, who is still with us by the Spirit, in a way we would not have had if he had simply lived an ordinary mortal human life walking from one place to another in first century Palestine.

Maybe once we dare to say it out loud, that it seems hard at first to be happy for Jesus, rather than thinking we are not allowed to say or feel that, then we can hear his assurance that his love will not abandon us... even if he does change how that love gets us.

There it is: we don't lose the love. The route he takes to get to us simply changes.

That is enough for us to live on today.  That is something to be, in a word, happy, about.

Lord Jesus, bear our honesty, our hurt, and our fear, and then when we have vented it all to you, assure us that your love will not dry up, but will come to us by new channels every morning.  And let that love bring us your joy.