Where is Jesus?

He wears a red and white-striped sweater.  Regardless of the temperature, he is never spied (when he’s spied at all) without his toboggan cap.  I’m told he wears glasses.  Since 1987, people have been searching far and wide for him: straining, squinting, trying to catch a glimpse.  Whether in a crowded city scene, on the beach, or at the circus, we struggle in vain to detect his presence.  Until sooner or later someone cries out, “Where’s Waldo?”

We read the Waldo books to our kids when they were little.  They would turn each page with glee to hunt for Waldo, but as their eyes scanned up and down to no avail, smiles would be replaced by furrowed brows, as the toboggan cap and striped sweater remained elusive.  And if  the kids were tired and cranky, the whole enterprise would end in tears.

This is the Sunday following Ascension Day, and this morning we read the passage from Acts in which Jesus leaves the disciples and, in Luke’s telling, literally ascends into heaven like some god in a Greek drama, as if hoisted into the sky by pulleys and ropes.  Just before Jesus disappears, the disciples ask him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”  The language in which the question is cast is opaque to us, but they are asking, in essence, “Now that Easter has happened—now that you have defeated death—is this the moment when wounds will be healed, brokenness mended, wrongs righted?  Is this the final scene, when all of God’s purposes will be fulfilled?” 

In response, Jesus equivocates.  He says, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.”  And with that, like the Wizard of Oz rising into the sky in his hot air balloon, Jesus is gone.

From that moment to this, the followers of Jesus have been waiting and looking.  We want Jesus to return to finish what he started.  And while each generation tends to think it lives in the midst of the very worst the world can get, it is true that our own present world is thoroughly broken.  Whether we consider war and devastation in far flung places like Sudan or Ukraine, the hunger we see each week here at home through our food pantry, natural disasters like the March 31 tornado that affected so many of our own parishioners, or the toxic polarization of relationships throughout communities across the globe, the project of redemption and repair Jesus began surely seems unfinished.  If we’re so inclined, we might borrow the words from Peter’s first letter today and say, “Like a roaring lion, our adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour.”[i] 

All of which begs the question, where is Jesus?  What is he doing?  When will he appear?  Where will we find him?  Is he up in some ethereal heaven, looking down on us like the Greek gods on Olympus, or is he hiding in our midst, like Waldo in those children’s books?  As we strain our eyes to see him, we can certainly sometimes meltdown like children in our confusion and sorrow, as Jesus remains hidden from us in our hurting world.  What, then, to do?  With Jesus that elusive, how do we direct our anxiety in his absence? 

In a number of recent sermons[ii], we’ve talked about how many modern strands of Christianity have coped with Jesus’ absence.  They turn faith into a binary dualism, focusing not on this life but on the afterlife.  In reaction to the furtive, subconscious anxiety that Jesus is missing altogether, they posit instead that Jesus is up there in that faraway heaven where he rose on those ropes and pulleys so long ago, and that the entire point of this life is to focus on our individual status as either eventually joining him there or being cast into hell.

Could that be what it’s all about?  Let’s turn to the Gospel this morning and find out.  My fellow Saint Mark’s clergy have already heard me say that I don’t prefer to preach on John’s Gospel.  That’s not to say that I don’t like it.  I love John’s Gospel.  But it is by far the most difficult of the four gospels to preach, because in it Jesus delivers extensive speeches on the nature of God and us, and—as today—Jesus engages in lengthy one-sided conversations with God the Father.  When Jesus’ thoughts are broken into bite-sized bits, as John’s Gospel tends to be when preached or studied in bible studies, the bits can be taken to mean anything we want them to mean and not at all what Jesus intends.  Consequently, John’s Gospel is notoriously easy to misunderstand, both by lay people and, frankly, by preachers. 

Take, for example, the idea of “eternal life.”  Because of the tendency I described before, when, in our desperation to find Jesus we dilute Christianity into being primarily the means by which we’ll eventually get to join the disappeared Jesus up there in heaven, we take the term “eternal life” and, in our minds if not in our words, we translate it to mean “afterlife.”  But that’s not what John means by eternal life at all.

Which gets us back to our search for Jesus.  Where is he?  Throughout John’s Gospel, read as a whole and not in bits, we get a completely different sense of what Jesus’ ascension might mean.  Absent are Luke’s images of a Jesus lifted up into the clouds.  Rather, Jesus’ many speeches and prayers in John instead talk of a union between God and Jesus’ followers that is accomplished in and through Jesus.  (Already confusing, isn’t it?  I told you John is hard to preach!)  It comes to a head in chapter seventeen, just after what we read today.  Jesus prays to God, “I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.”[iii]  Just a few verses prior, Jesus gives a name to this union.  He says, “This is eternal life, that [my followers] may know you.”  It’s no secret that, in biblical parlance, the term “to know” means more than data points.  It means an intimate knowing, like that of lovers, an embracing union.

The biblical scholar William Countryman wrote a book called The Mystical Way in the Fourth Gospel, and that title may help us to understand what Jesus is talking about more than anything else.  Eternal life is not the afterlife.  It doesn’t refer to us rising up to heaven to join the Jesus who got there before us.  It means that, somehow, Jesus has already joined us to God mystically.  Somehow, through his resurrection, just as the temple curtain was rent open, Jesus has opened our souls, and into us Jesus has flowed, like the current of a river.  Jesus has not ascended up there, John says, but in here.  And that presence of Christ in us, connecting us directly to the divine—to God—replaces the life we have lived with a new life, eternal life, the life in which God is not, even now, distant and apart from us, but in us, uniting us with God and with one another.  “I in them and you in me,” Jesus says.

Where is Jesus?  We can quit straining our eyes to look for him, hidden in the crowd.  We can stop pining for the day after death when we’ll finally rise up to meet him.  Jesus is here, right now.  Jesus lives in you and in me, and through us.  Jesus is a risen, living reality.  If we look inwardly for him, into our own souls, our anxiety will melt as we meet Jesus there.  And, we will find ourselves empowered by his presence to move through the world binding its wounds and mending its brokenness.  When we discover than Christ lives within—truly lives, connecting us to God—then eternal life begins this very day.  

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[i] 1 Peter 5:8

[ii] https://rectorspage.wordpress.com/2023/05/07/poetry-or-plastic-what-is-the-way/ and https://rectorspage.wordpress.com/2023/03/26/those-who-believe-in-me/

[iii] John 17:23, English Standard Version

Poetry or Plastic: What is “the Way”?

Today’s Gospel passage reminds me of the story of the Episcopalian who dies and meets Jesus at the front door of heaven.  “Come right in,” Jesus says cheerfully, “In my Father’s house there are many rooms.  Let me show you around.”  As the two walk down a long hallway, the Episcopalian glances in an open door to see a jazz band playing and scores of people dancing with wild abandon. 

“Who are they?” the Episcopalian asks.  “That’s the Church of Christ,” Jesus says, “They weren’t allowed to play musical instruments or dance on earth, so here they get to cut loose.”

As Jesus and the Episcopalian walk a bit farther, they pass a room with an Olympic-sized swimming pool with water slides and diving boards and filled with scantily-clad swimmers drinking fruity rum drinks.  Everyone is having a great time.  “And who are they?” the Episcopalian asks.  “Those are the Southern Baptists,” Jesus replies.  They weren’t allowed to swim or drink in life, so now they get to have their day in the sun, so to speak.”

As they continue to walk down the hallway, the revelry quiets until things are so still all that can be heard is a slow, repeated creaking coming from the final door.  As they approach, the new arrival can see a room full of near-catatonic people in rocking chairs, hands folded in their laps, rocking back and forth.  The man asks, “And who are these?”

 “These are the Episcopalians,” Jesus answers.  “They got to do everything on earth, so they don’t get to do anything up here!” 

(Makes you just a little bit nervous, doesn’t it?)

“In my mansion, there are many rooms.”

Today’s Gospel reading is the single most frequently chosen scripture passage read at funerals.  In the hundreds of funerals at which I’ve officiated over the past two decades, I’d estimate that this passage has been read 90% of the time.  Why is that?  Because, on the face of it, it seems to be all about the destination, about where we go when we die, about what’s at the other end of that long, opaque tunnel we ultimately and only travel alone.  It serves as an assurance to us, and for those whose loss we grieve, that, whatever’s beyond that tunnel, it will be good. 

In a first century world in which the house of virtually anyone less than nobility would have consisted of one or two small rooms[i], Jesus paints a picture of a palatial house—or, as the King James Version puts it, a mansion—with many rooms.  And one of those rooms is prepared for you.  That’s a wonderful comfort.

Notice why: The image Jesus’ audience receives is one from their own fantasies and daydreams of maximal comfort and ease.  Heaven consists, in other words, of what we wish this life were like.  Our images of heaven are not a lot different than those of the joke I told at the outset.  Whatever we want life to be in the here and now but isn’t, that’s what we imagine heaven will be.

It has always been so in religions and cultures that have a conception of an afterlife.  For the Greeks, heaven was the Elysian Fields, the place the heroes and the chosen go upon death, described by Homer as, “where life is easiest for men. No snow is there, nor heavy storm, nor rain, but ever does [the] ocean send up the…west wind that [it] may cool men.”[ii]  The Greek poet Hesiod adds that Elysium is populated by “happy heroes for whom the grain-giving earth bears honey-sweet fruit.”[iii]  (Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?)

Sebastiano Conca’s Elysian Fields

In Islam, the Quran describes heaven similarly.  Heaven, it says, consists of “gardens of lasting bliss graced with flowing streams.”  Those in heaven “will be adorned with bracelets of gold.  They will wear green garments of fine silk and brocade [and] be comfortably seated on soft chairs.”[iv]

I love these images.  But here’s the thing: All such images draw the attention away from life and toward death.  They constantly look past the present to a future beyond knowing.

Even more important is this: In the Gospels, Jesus is recorded as speaking over thirty-one thousand words.  By the best count, he speaks of heaven exactly twice.[v]  What does this tell us?  It reveals that our common, conventional understanding of Christianity—that it is primarily about our path to heaven—is wrong.  That’s not to say heaven doesn’t exist.  But it is to say that we’ve allowed our own insecurity, anxiety, and fear about what happens after we die to coopt a Gospel message that is almost entirely about something else. 

Let me put it this way: There are religious billboards throughout the South that pose in huge, ominous letters, “Are you ready to die today?”  That always seems to me the wrong question.  A better, more faithful Gospel question would be, “Are you ready to live today?”

How might we read this Gospel passage from John differently if we understood Jesus to be talking about not the way to where we go when we die, but the way to live in the here and now?  You see, Thomas does not ask Jesus, “How can we know the destination?”  Thomas asks, “How can we know the Way?”  That term is loaded with meaning in the Gospels and in early Christianity.  Indeed, in the Book of Acts, the followers of Jesus are primarily referred to as “People of the Way.”  Jesus’ original followers understood, in ways we have lost, that the Christian life—the life of discipleship—is not about where we go when we die, but how we live, a particular, God-centered way of being in the world.

At the risk of getting a bit esoteric here, I want to introduce you to my favorite early church theologian, a fellow named Origen who lived in the early third century A.D.  Origen’s careful study of the creation stories in Genesis—those first three chapters of the bible that tell us about how we were created and how we fell from grace—revealed to him that Genesis uses two different verbs for how we were created.  The first word, from Genesis 1:27, is the verb from which we derive our English word “poetry.”  The second verb, from Genesis 2:7, is the word from which we derive our English word “plastic.”[vi]  Origen argued, in effect, that God originally created us as God’s own poetry.  (Isn’t that a lovely image?)  But as we ignored God and grace and goodness and fell farther and farther from God, we hardened, and became less like poetry and more like plastic.  We became locked into our rigid, worldly ways of being and forgot how to be poetry in this world at all.

If we take Origen’s theology seriously (and I take it very seriously), then the Way of Jesus—the message and call of Jesus upon our lives—is to become poetry again in this world.  Through joy, and celebration, and worship, and fellowship, and embrace of the marginalized, and service (especially through service) we begin to lose our spiritual rigidity like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz when oil is added to his joints.  We shed our plastic coating and begin to be fluid with grace.  Like the words of Shakespeare or John Donne or Wendell Berry or Mary Oliver, we once again become poetry in this world.

And what’s more, the point isn’t to be this way until we get to where we’re going when we die.  The Way isn’t the path to heaven.  The Way is heaven.  Jesus is not saying to Thomas today, “When you die, you’ll get there.”  Jesus is saying, “The Way I’ve been teaching you and showing you and exemplifying for you is the destination.  The Way is Truth and is Life.”         

Put differently, if we follow the Way of Jesus, all of life is heaven. If we do not, then we miss heaven entirely.  If we fail to follow the Way of Jesus, we remain rigid, plastic things.  If we follow the Way, we become the very poetry of God. 

Are you ready to live today? 

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[i] See, for instance, St. Peter’s house in Capernaum on the banks of the Sea of Galilee.

[ii] Homer, Odyssey (4.560–565)

[iii] Hesiod, Works and Days (170)

[iv] Quran, Surah 18:31

[v] Obliquely in the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man (Luke 16:19-31) and directly on the cross in Luke 23:43, when he says to the thief, “Truly, today you will be with me in paradise.”

[vi] https://hds.harvard.edu/news/2019/03/19/flesh-and-fire-reincarnation-and-universal-salvation-early-church