Where Jesus' Mouth Is--May 19, 2023

Where Jesus' Mouth Is--May 19, 2023

[Jesus said to his disciples:] "I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live." [John 14:18-19]

Without even knowing their context, these words of Jesus are absolutely a beautiful promise.  It is certainly a great comfort to hear Jesus tell his followers that he will neither abandon them nor let death get the last word over them.

But when you realize that he makes that blanket promise knowing he is talking to people who will all abandon him and leave him to face death alone to save their own skins, it becomes a declaration of unfathomable grace.

These words, which were part of the Gospel reading for many this past Sunday, come from Jesus' last words to his inner circle of disciples on the night in which he was betrayed.  This is the night many Christians recount each year in Holy Week as Maundy Thursday, and as John's Gospel tells it, is the night Jesus washed his disciples' feet, well aware that he was also washing the feet of his betrayer.  This is the night we remember as Jesus' last supper with his disciples, in which Jesus tells his disciples [as Matthew tells the story], "You will all become deserters because of me this night." And in that scene, when Simon Peter insists he would never abandon Jesus, Jesus tells Peter that before the night is out, he'll have denied him three times.  This is the same night when, John's Gospel later insists, "Jesus, knowing all that was to happen to him," still steps forward into the danger when the lynch mob and the temple police come, in order to protect the very disciples who will bail out on him and scatter in mere minutes.

And, of course, they do.  Jesus' community of disciples--those who have become like a found family to him in their time together--do abandon him.  To Jesus, it almost had to feel like being orphaned--losing the ones who had been his circle of support and love, all in a blur of their fear.  The gospels, for all the different details they recount about that night, all insist that Jesus knows ahead of time where things are going. And yet, not only does he go through with it anyway, but he promises his disciples not to do to them what they are about to do to him.  "I will not leave you orphaned," has a very different ring to it when you know the one saying it is fully aware he is about to be abandoned... and that he's saying it to the very same ones who will abandon him. "Because I live, you will live," hits our ears with different power when you realize Jesus is saying it to people who leave Jesus to die in order to try and save their own lives.

This is what the Christian faith is really all about, though, isn't it?  It's always been about God's love as we see it in Jesus, and that love simply will not let our failures set the terms for our relationship with God.  Jesus will not let the disciples' impending desertion hold him back from sticking it out with them.  He will not let the trouble and death they give him over to be the way he treats them.  He will not hold their sins against them.  And this story makes it clear that Jesus doesn't forgive sins in the abstract, as hypothetically possible infringements of celestial rules, but as one who knows personally what it is like to be hurt by those sins.

That also means that Jesus' teaching [and the teaching of numerous voices across the New Testament, as we've seen in recent weeks in these devotions] not to return evil for evil has also been tried in the crucible of real-life experience.   This is an important thing to note, because sometimes people will dismiss Jesus' teaching about loving your enemies and doing good to those who persecute you as a bunch of naive wishful thinking from someone stuck in an ivory tower.  If you assume Jesus never had to actually put his money where his mouth is, you can give yourself permission to ignore those teachings about not seeking revenge and write Jesus off as someone who doesn't know how things are in "the real world." But when you realize that the Jesus who preaches against scorekeeping and bean-counting in the Sermon on the Mount is the same one who lives out that same kind of love when his closest friends abandon him, it is all the more compelling.  Jesus never calls his followers to do something he hasn't done already first--and he calls us to a love that doesn't keep score because he has loved us the same way, all the way to a cross.  

Today, hear Jesus' words as spoken to you, and for you: he does not abandon us or leave us orphaned, no matter what we do or how we flake out on him.  And at the same time, hear Jesus' silence where we might be tempted to insert guilt-trips or passive-aggressive jabs: Jesus doesn't say to his disciples, "I won't leave you or forsake you... unlike SOME people around here are about to do to me." He knows, but he doesn't weaponize that knowledge against them... or us.  There is love spoken where we have not earned it, and silence where others might condescendingly scold.  This, dear ones, is how we are loved.

This, dear ones, is the love we step into on this new day.

Lord Jesus, enable us to love as you have loved us first--beyond our failings, our fickleness, and our faithlessness.