Fourth Sunday in Lent
John 314 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up,[f] 15 that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”[g]
16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. 19 This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. 21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.
Beware the Ides of March.
Good advice, really. If you’re a dictator, and you’re on your way to the Senate, and your so-called friends have little daggers under their togas and everyone is acting a little weird and you suddenly realize it’s the Ides of March.
The Ides of March. It was actually a thing, the Ides of March. On the Ides of each month (meaning the middle) the Ides Sheep were paraded down the Via Sacra in Rome and eventually led to a place where priests used little daggers just like those rogue senators. And there was a specific ritual for the Ides of March, which involved ceremonially roughing up an old man and driving him from the city to represent the end of the old year and the beginning of the new. Suddenly the little dust up in the Senate is starting to make sense.
So it unfolds like this: Caesar is making his way to the Senate when a seer shouts at him “Beware the Ides of March.” According to Plutarch, Caesar says “the Ides of March have come” meaning I’m still here. “Aye,” the seer says, “but they have not gone.” At this point it might be wise to simply head home, but Caesar is likely thinking ‘I defeated the Gauls, I can handle a few senators.’
The trouble begins, seemingly related to one senators’ petty grievance, and this unleashes the anger of a number of senators. According to some sources, he is stabbed 23 times by 60 senators. If you’re wondering how that makes sense, I have no answer. The important moment is what happens next, according to some sources, and most importantly William Shakespeare: Caesar says “Et tu, Brute?”
This next section of the sermon is written specifically for those who teach dead languages at local universities: “The name ‘Brutus,’ a second declension masculine noun, appears in the phrase in the vocative case, and so the -us ending of the nominative case is replaced by -e.* In other words, betrayal has become a calling for Brutus, and history will remember him for it. The vocative case is how we call people or things, such as “O death, where is thy sting?” Vocative has the same root as vocation, the thing to which we feel called. And for Brutus, and the senate that day, it was violence and darkness.
I share this because the assassination of Julius Caesar was perhaps the most famous historical event in the time of Jesus. Like the Second World War in our time, everything seemed to relate back to the death of Caesar. Civil war followed, then the emergence of Caesar Augustus as the first Roman Emperor, and the regime under which Jesus and almost everyone in the known world toiled under.
Even the language should grab our attention. Within a couple years of the assassination Caesar is declared ‘the divine Caesar’ a new Roman God. Augustus, Caesar’s heir and adopted son, was in love with this fact, and began calling himself “Son of God.” It appeared on his coins, the same coin Jesus held when he said “who’s likeness is this?” Obviously the world didn’t have room for two people calling themselves “Son of God.” Something would have to give.
So listen to our passage again, but this time listen with this Son of God controversy in your mind: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” This shifts the promise of living under a Son of God from the supposed good fortune of living under Caesar to the eternal life of living under Christ. But there is more.
This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.
This is the Jesus that makes us feel slightly uncomfortable, the Jesus that liberal Christians tend to set aside by saying ‘that’s just John doing a little theology after the fact.’ They try to square this philosophical Jesus with the Jesus of Matthew, Mark and Luke and they cannot. So they leave this Jesus to the conservatives (who love light and dark) and they focus instead on the ethical teacher Jesus who didn’t want to condemn anyone.
The difficulty with this reasoning is that it reflects the relative peace and security of the North American early 21st century Christian instead of all the other Christians that have ever read this text. Read it again with 60 frenzied senators and 23 stab wounds, recalling that it is a top-of-mind story for everyone who may have heard Jesus’ words:
This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.
The link here is compounded by the fact that the senators couldn’t even own up to what they had done: most fled the chamber to literally run away from their crime. Some tried to let the public know that Rome was now free from the dictator Caesar, but no one wanted to hear it. The city literally shut their doors in the face of trouble, some fearing anarchy and many upset that the leader they loved was now dead. What followed was a dozen years of civil war.
Now, whenever we feel uncomfortable, and we can’t square the Jesus we love and the Jesus we can’t seem to love, we always need to do the same thing: ask Paul. Only Paul can be trusted to bring these Jesus’s together in a way that makes sense. And the other lectionary reading for Lent 4, the one we didn’t make poor Lang read, is from Ephesians 2:
All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
For two weeks now our intrepid group of religious historians have been looking at Wesley, Calvin, Knox, a little Luther, the remarkable Susanna Wesley, and lesser known reformers like Lady Huntingdon. The thread that connects them all is the discovery described by Paul: “by grace you have been saved.” For some the moment of discovery is quite specific, and for others we cannot know. But the conclusion, and the life-altering shift was the same: Emerging from a sense depravity to accept the grace God freely gives, leading to the grateful response of a life of faith. “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”
It was Paul that discovered that at our baptism we died with Christ, and when we emerged from the water of baptism we were raised to new life in Christ. This a gift freely given, we need only embrace it. We can’t earn our way out of trouble, and we can’t stop being being who we all on our own (“children of wrath, like everyone else”). We need God’s help and God’s grace to overcome the very heart of ourselves and become who we were truly meant to be, best found in John 3:
But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.
May we live this grateful response, living in the light of God’s grace and truth, and may we help others find it too. Amen.
*Wikipedia
posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 6:02 AM
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