The Way, the Truth, the Life - For Easter 5


He is the Way.
Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness,
You will see rare beasts and have unique adventures.

He is he Truth.
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety,
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life.
Love Him in the World of the Flesh,
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy. 

These three stanzas from W.H. Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio have been a prominent landmark in my soulscape for almost exactly thirty years. I read them first in the late spring of 1981. Deborah’s wedding gift to me in 1983 was to cross-stitch these nine lines of poetry and put them in a frame. And over the years, the words have themselves become a frame – a way of reading part of John 14, one of the series of “I am” illuminations that characterize the Fourth Gospel.

The places through and in which we follow, seek and love Jesus are, I think, just the ones that Auden identifies. In the Land of Unlikeness, through which Auden invites us to follow Jesus, we discover Jesus as the One whose love mediates the many unlikenesses that could easily (and so often do) become the basis for suspicion, hostility, fear and violence. Rare beasts indeed, including the rare beast that appears out of our own unlikeness in the eyes of others. I don’t think it is any exaggeration to suggest that unless we can follow the mediating One through this otherwise terrifying land, we cannot offer the world a gospel alternative to its tribal defaults, and we will continue to demonize the unlikeness of others, and remain blind to our own.

The Kingdom of Anxiety, in which Auden invites us to seek Jesus, is a kingdom of real apprehension about the future. It is hard to live in history without being touched and affected by that apprehension, that anxiety. But it is precisely in the midst of that anxious kingdom that Jesus offers an alternative to the kingdom driven by anxiety. In the midst of a world of multiplying fears and self-defeating remedies, Jesus proclaims and embodies the ethic of a Kingdom governed instead by love. The truth of such a kingdom radiates out from the One we seek as an invitation to live unafraid in the world God loves.

And the World of the Flesh – that’s where we are to love Jesus. That’s where Jesus eats and washes feet, and says, “This is my body, for you.”  And it’s where, with our bodies, we “do this in memory”. We offer our bodies in prayer and kindness, in bending to serve and in clamouring for justice, in the close intimacies of life-long friendship and in the passing courtesies of strangers. Maybe sometimes churches have seemed to disdain the body. But bodies are the honest truth about our lives. What we do is what our bodies do – including how we love or fail to love. Our bodies are the bread and wine we offer to God at the table.

The Land of Unlikeness, the Kingdom of Anxiety, the World of the Flesh. That’s where we follow Jesus the Way, seek Jesus the Truth, and love Jesus the Life.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jesus-the-Friendship-of-God

Here’s the end of the gospel portion read at Valerie’s funeral: “Thomas said, ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?’ Jesus said, ‘I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’”  It’s a tough text for a preacher in a multi-faith world. It can easily seem as if Christians are claiming unique access to the divine homecoming based on having chosen – or inherited – the right religious beliefs. But Jesus isn’t talking about Christianity. He’s not talking about beliefs. He is talking about the human embodiment of the Friendship of God as the way home to God.  In the preaching moment, there was lots of material for a homily without venturing into those difficult waters. So it  was not until a few days later that I realized the way the text and the occasion might have worked together. You see, I was preaching at the funeral of a friend. Not just my friend, though she was that. But a friend . Friend was who she was, he
Read more

Truth to speak as we wait: An Advent Litany

Let us ask God to restore us to a place of Advent waiting.  One:     A gainst the darkness of waiting,  All:        we dazzle ourselves with a garish neon skyline of our own making.                   We are blind to the rising Star of your New Creation.  One:      Against the silence of waiting,  All:        we fill our ears with the clatter of common sense.                  We are deaf to the tone and the tempo of your Song.  One:      Against the uncertainty of waiting,  All:       we hide in the stale air of closed rooms.                  We miss the scent of your Beauty as it passes through our streets.  One:      Against the nakedness of waiting,  All:         we hide our skin from the hardness and harm of the world.                   We miss your healing Touch: warm, loving, strong.  One:      Against the hunger of waiting,  All:        we fill our mouths with the same stale cake as always.                  We miss the Food of angels on your table.  One:      O God
Read more

Jesus the Welcomed Stranger

Matthew 25. 14-30, November 19, 2023: “Pentecost 25”  Matthew 25. 31-46, November 26, 2023: “The Reign of Christ”  I wonder if we really believe that Jesus is proposing the slaves who double their master’s money as spiritual models, as kingdom-ready exemplary followers of the way of Jesus. Or if, as in the case the wise and ungenerous bridesmaids in the previous parable, their cleverness invites some measure of scepticism towards the idea that we are to emulate them. I wonder if we’re ready to see this as another instance of Jesus telling a story to provoke a probing spiritual and ethical examination of what it means to enter into the fullness of our humanity, to live a “good life”.  All by itself, without the parable that precedes it and the eschatological drama that follows (and if you can overlook the pretty broad smirk in the story when it commends usury as more-or-less “better than nothing”) this could be the story it’s been fashioned into by so many – a story commending the inv
Read more