Because I Live
John 14:15-21
May 25, 2014[1]
Today is the Sixth
Sunday of Easter—a season of seven weeks, seven weeks of celebrating the joy of
the Resurrection. It has been a season
filled with challenges: challenges to
respond to the Risen Lord; to remember our identity as Children of God; and to
remember the promise Jesus made to be with us even to the end of the age. We have had a few additional highlights along
the way—such as Confirmation Sunday, when ten young people proclaimed their
faith in Jesus Christ, and one of their parents also took the step of becoming
a member of Cunningham. We have had the
joy of singing hymns of the Gospel. We
have come a long way.
But today, we return
again to the Resurrection as our theme.
We have had six weeks to ponder the mystery of the Good News. Today, however, it is time to look more
deeply at the question “Why is the Resurrection important to me today?”
The answer appears in
today’s Gospel Lesson. Before Jesus was
executed, he said to His followers, “Because I live, you also will live …” (John 14:19b).
Notice that these words
were spoken by Jesus in the present tense, but in these words He give us a
future promise. Because I—the One who is
“the resurrection and the life”—because I live, you also will live (John 11:25). There two layers of promise here.
There is the hope for
all of us that we too will learn what eternal life with God will be like. There is a future tense for all of us. Not that we understand exactly what that life
will be like, but we get glimpses, once in a while. Perhaps it comes to us in those moments when
we witness one we love crossing that threshold from life into eternal
life. Perhaps it comes to us when, in
the middle of our struggles to cope with our present, we receive a word of
assurance, a word of hope, that this life is not all there is. But try as we might, we cannot really “know”
in an experiential sense what the future will be like until we get there. We have to wait for it. That is why we refer to “eternal life” as our
Christian “hope.” The Apostle Paul wrote
that, “hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But
if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:24b-25). We wait with hope in the One who said,
“because I live, you also will live.”
There is a
second layer of meaning here in these words of Jesus. Bear in mind that when He spoke these words
two thousand years ago, what we call the present moment was a future moment to
Him. Could it be that Jesus was not
referring to our hope for eternal life in the future, but to our lives in the
present. Could it be that Jesus was
suggesting that through Him, the One who is the “way, the truth and the life”
(John 14:6), we can discover eternal
life now, in the present dimension?
After all, Jesus did tell his followers that He came that they—and
we—“may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10b).
Yet so much
of the time, we walk around in prisons—prisons that we ourselves have helped to
build around us; prisons of brokenness, enslavement to unhealthy living, broken
relationships, guilt. All the product of
our own past actions and the actions of those around us. It is the law of cause and effect at
work—what some religious traditions call “karma.” In so many ways, we let the lives of our past
dictate who we are today and who we will be tomorrow.
But Jesus
Christ calls us to freedom. We no longer
have to be slaves to who we are—He calls us to become a “new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17), a “royal
priesthood” and a “holy nation” (1 Peter
2:9). He calls us to be transformed
and restored into the image of God in
which we were created. We no longer have
to be slaves to our past. Our past does
not have to hold us forever, any more than that tomb in the rock could hold
Jesus. Jesus came to free us. Because He tasted death but lives again, we
too can be freed from the live-enslaving histories of our past. Because
He lives, we too can live—in the present moments of our lives.
Carla Lee
introduced me to a podcast called “The Moth,” where you can hear people tell
the stories of their lives. The one rule
they must live by is that they must tell their stories without notes. Other than that, just about anything
goes. Sometimes, that freedom leads to
stories that I would not repeat from this pulpit; but sometimes, I hear
life-changing stories. I heard one of
those stories this past week.
Kevin
McAuliffe is a fourth grade teacher in New York City. As a child, Kevin had developed normally
until, at the age of thirteen, he developed an obsession with washing his
hands. He would wash his hands over and
over again, like a surgeon, until they became red and chapped. He would hold his hands upright, trying to
avoid touching anything. He refused to
go to his own bedroom, fearing that something awful had taken up residence
there that would get him. He wouldn’t go
to the barbershop because he feared contamination from the scissors. His sister tied his shoes for him, so that he
wouldn’t get germs from his shoes and shoelaces—germs that were just waiting to
attack. He “was a wreck.” His parents came up with one last solution—to
send Kevin alone to New York City—a place where Kevin was convinced that “germs
were born.” But Kevin had a brother
named Michael, the trailblazer in the family, who had graduated from college
and was living in Manhattan. Maybe
Michael a visit with Michael would serve as a sort of “intervention.” Michael was intense, one of those
personalities that overtook every room in which he entered. Kevin didn’t know how he would ever make it
back alive. He describes his search on
the train to find the seat with the fewest stains on it. He arrived at his brother’s apartment. Michael didn’t ask Kevin about his
craziness—he just said to him, “we are going out.” Kevin gulped and instinctively went to the
sink to wash his hands. Just as he put
his hands into the water, Michael stopped him and said “you aren’t washing your
hands this weekend.” They ate dinner at
a restaurant in New York, and as Kevin adjusted to the notion that he could
live without the chains of his compulsion, for the first time in ages he felt
normal again.
He did okay
until they were walking back to the apartment and, on the way, his old
compulsion started taking over again.
Kevin discovered that the sidewalk was a minefield of spots—spots that
he was certain could destroy him. Kevin
focused on the spots, taking great care to avoid stepping on a single one—it
could contaminate him forever. They
almost had made it back to the apartment when he stepped on one last spot, and
his world fell apart. Once again, he was
defiled. Now, all he could think about
was how he was going to get rid of the only pair of shoes that he had brought
with him to New York. When they got back
to the apartment, Michael could tell that something was wrong. When he finally could get Kevin to tell what
had happened, Michael said nothing. He
simply got up, walked over to the defiled shoe, picked it up, and licked the
sole. He said, “Kev, I’m still
alive.” He sat back down. Kevin felt great like a great weight had been
lifted from him. He was not cured
immediately that night, but he discovered how good it could feel to win a
battle. He discovered that he could live
free from the fears that had broken him.[2]
That story
was not told from a religious perspective; but I can see in that story such a
graphic portrayal of what God did for us through Jesus Christ. When God saw our brokenness, when He saw that
we would not listen to His messengers, He took the step of becoming one of
us. In the life and person of Jesus of
Nazareth, He showed us how to live abundantly, how to love divinely. He literally tasted death, so through His
resurrection, He could say to us, “See, I am still alive.” Because I live, you also will live.
We no longer
need to be contaminated by the spots on the sidewalks of our lives. We can be freed to live in the present. And by living fully and freely in our
present, we can face the future unafraid.
As one writer put it, “The more I trust in God and allow Him to lead me
the more I experience hope in Him, who raises me up from weakness, poverty and
pain to the joy of His Resurrection.” [3]
Yet, we seem to spend so much
time focusing on the life-denying circumstances that surround us.
What does it mean to live in
hope of the Resurrection? It does not
mean that we will live without weakness, poverty or pain. It does not mean that we will not experience
physical death. But it does mean that we
are free to live abundantly, free from the fears and chains that have bound us,
in whatever circumstance we face, whether in weakness or in strength, in pain
or in comfort, in life or in death or in life beyond death.
Because I live, you also will
live. I pray that you will live in that
hope today. May it be so!
Copyright © 2014 by Thomas E.
Frost. All rights reserved.
[1]
Preached at Cunningham United Methodist Church in Palmyra, Virginia.
[2]
Kevin McAulliffe, “Sink or Swim” on The
Moth: True Stories Told Live. Recorded August 28, 2012; broadcast on April
28, 2014. Accessed on May 24, 2014 at http://themoth.org/posts/stories/sink-or-swim.
[3] Father George
Aschenbrenner S.J., “Examen,” Fr. John English, ed., viewed on the internet on
May 20, 2014 at http://www.diocese.cc/upload/images/originals/Examens 070510A.pdf
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