Before we begin the Passion Gospel, I want to say something about one of the verses we’re going to hear. After Jesus is arrested, Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, holds a public appearance where he offers to free one of the prisoners the Romans are holding, as a goodwill gesture because it’s the Passover, the great Jewish feast of freedom. Pilate offers them a man named Barabbas, or Jesus himself. 

Luke’s Gospel says that Barabbas was wanted for insurrection agains the Romans – that he was a freedom fighter, of the violent variety. He may have been popular with the crowd for that reason – or Jesus may have been unpopular. We are in Jerusalem here, in Judea, where many people have never really taken to Jesus’ message. They see him as a strange outsider who talks down about the Great Temple and the version of Jewish faith centered on the Temple. 

Whatever the reason – and there’s much to explore and wonder about – the crowd that gathers for Pilate’s prisoner release stunt demands that Barabbas be freed, and Jesus be executed. Please note, this is not the same crowd that greeted Jesus on his arrival in the city! Some of the people could have been the same, but this is five days later and in a different place. It’s not like a thousand people loved Jesus one minute and hated him the next. 

As Matthew sees it, Pilate doesn’t really want to have Jesus executed, but he has to do it because the crowd is demanding it – and as the Roman governor, his job is to keep the peace. A riot at Passover could get messy. So, even though it is the Roman government that has the power to perform executions, even though Jesus will be crucified by Roman soldiers, Pilate tries to excuse himself, saying,“I am innocent of this man’s blood.” 

And Matthew has the people respond – “His blood be upon us and upon our children!”

In fact the text says that the PEOPLE AS A WHOLE say that. It’s not a particular crowd, this particular thousand people, but the entire Jewish people. And that is what Matthew means. 

This line – “His blood be upon us and upon our children!” – is only in Matthew’s Gospel. I believe, quite strongly, that this line is something Matthew has ADDED to the account of these events that he received – in order to explicitly blame the Jewish people for Jesus’ death.

And Matthew does that because he has seen terrible, terrible things. In the year 66, there’s a revolt against the Romans in Judea. The Romans have massively superior military force, and they crush the revolt. Jerusalem burns. The Great Temple is torn down. Countless people die. Matthew sees this. I suspect he was an eyewitness; I suspect he lost people – just because his rage and grief burn so hot. 

And Matthew – writing his account of the Gospel; struggling to make sense of horror – comes to an explanation. He doesn’t say, Well, this is what empires do: they hold territory by force, against the will of many of the locals, and now and then the locals revolt, and the empire, if it’s strong enough, crushes the revolt so they can keep holding the territory and extracting wealth from it. 

Instead Matthew says: This is God’s punishment on the Jews for rejecting Jesus. 

And the terrible thing, beloveds, is this:

Matthew thought that punishment was accomplished. Done. 

But as Christianity became a religion with political and social power in the subsequent centuries, Christian leaders used this text to justify persecuting Jews. 

This idea – that the Jewish people as a whole carry blood guilt for Jesus’ death – has a body count in the millions. And it’s not dead yet. 

I always encourage us to read Scripture with a thoughtful eye. With respect, with love, with curiosity, but also with an awareness that texts speak in complicated ways, and that there’s much to wonder about what we receive in this book we call holy. 

In this case, beloveds, I encourage us to actively resist this part of Matthew’s telling of this story.

And I’ve asked the Narrator to give us time to pause after that line. Among the other pauses and moments we’ll take to just breathe through everything that’s hard and sad and terrible about the story the church tells today, we will take a moment of stillness for the weight of all the violence that this text has justified. 

In sharing all this, it’s not my intention to deflect our attention from Jesus – the central figure in this story, the central figure in our faith. Accepting this death, Jesus takes on all the ways humans hurt each other… the burden of our capacity to hate, condemn, destroy. Surely it must have been one of the most difficult aspects of our humanity for God to take on fully. 

But he does take it on – and it kills him. 

That’s the part of the story we tell today, and again on Friday. It’s a hard part of the story. But it’s not the end of the story. In some ways it’s just the beginning. 

We’ll continue in the Passion Gospel booklet. You may need to share with a neighbor. 

Those reading the parts of the Narrator and Jesus should come to microphones. Other readers are asked to stay in your place, and STAND and USE YOUR BIG VOICE when it’s time to speak your lines. 

The rest of us will sit for the first part of the Passion Gospel. We will be invited to stand, later. 

This homily is for All-Ages worship featuring a Scripture drama of the story of the Man Born Blind from John’s Gospel. 

What does it mean to be blind? … 

Does anybody know someone who’s blind? … 

We depend on our eyes a lot. But we have other senses too. 

Close your eyes for a minute and notice what you hear, what you feel, what you smell…

Many people who are blind really use their sense of hearing, and their sense of touch. This is an example of a prayer book made for people who are blind, who read with an alphabet called Braille, that you read with your fingers!… 

We used to have a member of this congregation who was blind. His name was Jerry. He died about nine years ago. 

Once when we had this story about the blind man in church, 

I asked him about it, after church.

I asked him: Does it bother you when the Bible talks about being blind like it’s a bad thing?

And he said, “No, it doesn’t bother me. Being blind is just part of who I am. I met my wife because I was blind. I spent my life helping other blind people learn how to care for themselves. Being blind isn’t a burden for me, so I don’t mind how people talk about it.” 

For the young man in the story, the problem isn’t really that his eyes don’t work.

The problem is that people around him see that as a problem.

Can people who are blind have jobs?

Can people who are blind get married and have families, if they want to?

Can people who are blind participate in their communities?

Can people who are blind have full, happy, interesting lives?… 

Of course they can.

In the time of Jesus, there wasn’t a lot of understanding or support for people with disabilities. 

This young man was a beggar – that means he would just sit beside the road and beg, ask people for money. 

It’s probably not what he wanted to do.

It sounds pretty boring, frankly.

But the people around him couldn’t imagine anything else for him. 

Maybe that’s why Jesus healed him.

Not because his blindness was a problem,

But because the way people thought about his blindness was a problem.

They thought it might be a punishment, because he had done something bad; and they definitely thought it meant he couldn’t do normal things.

So Jesus healed him to free him from all those ideas. 

Those kinds of ideas are still around!  

We have come a long way, but we STILL sometimes think that people with disabilities have to live small, limited lives. 

To think that the disability is the problem,

Instead of thinking that the way we do things to exclude people with disabilities might be the problem. 

Let’s talk about the word disability. 

Have you heard that word before?… 

The Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, an important law in our country, says that a person with a disability is someone who “has has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activity.”

That was a bunch of big words. 

Let’s say the same thing more simply:

A person with a disability has something going on with their body, or their mind, that keeps them from doing some of the big things people normally do.

What do we think about that definition?…

Think about the young man in the story.

Is it his blindness that keeps him from doing the normal things that other people do, or is it the way other people think about his blindness?…

Hmm. We might not really know, but we can wonder about it. 

Let’s look at another definition of disability. 

This one comes from the World Health Organization. 

They say:

“Disability is part of being human.

Almost everybody will temporarily or permanently experience disability at some point in their life.”

That’s a big idea, isn’t it?

A few years ago St. Dunstan’s made a decision to spend a lot of money putting in an elevator. Before that we just had stairs between the levels of our main building. 

When we think about who might have trouble walking up stairs, we might think of older people who use a cane or walker or wheelchair.

But you know what?

When I was eight, I broke my leg. And my church didn’t have an elevator. And there was a flight of stairs up from the main door to the church, and there another flight of stairs up to the level with the Sunday school classrooms.

And my Sunday school teacher just carried me up to Sunday school. Lucky I was only eight and small enough to carry!!

Okay, let’s go back to what the World Health Organization says about disability. 

They say, “Disability results from the interaction between individuals with a health condition… with personal and environmental factors, including negative attitudes, inaccessible transportation and public buildings, and limited social support.”

Listen, this is important.

The ADA says disability means there’s something about a person’s body or mind that limits them.

The World Health Organization says: 

There’s a person with something different about their body or mind; and then there’s the world around them – the people, buildings, roads, schools, jobs, stores, all that stuff.

And disability happens when the world around that person doesn’t let them participate. 

Disability isn’t in the person.

It’s in the mismatch between the person, and everything around them that makes things difficult for them because of their difference. 

The World Health Organization says: 

“A person’s environment has a huge effect on the experience and extent of disability.”

This week I looked up an organization called Disability Rights Advocates. They bring legal cases to try and get companies and governmental agencies and other organizations to change how they do things to make it easier for people with various kinds of disabilities to do things. 

Here are some cases they’ve been involved with recently. 

• A case in New York about kids with diabetes, an illness that can mean you need to check in with your body and sometimes do things to keep yourself healthy during the day. Public schools in New York City weren’t working with kids to help them be in school and do things like field trips and sports. Does that seem right? … 

I think this is a really good example of the idea that disability is really between the person and their environment. 

There’s nothing about diabetes that should keep kids out of school – if the schools just commit to supporting them!

Now those schools have been ordered to help and support those kids so they can do school stuff like any other kid. 

• [A case in California where people who had trained as social workers, to be helpers in their community, and did really well in their training and wanted to do their work, couldn’t get hired if they had a diagnosis of a mental illness… even if it’s not impacting their work at all! Does that seem right? … ]

• We have an election in a couple of weeks – has anybody ever gone with their parents to vote? Do you know what a ballot looks like? … 

Here’s a printed-out sample ballot. It doesn’t look very much like the real ones, but it gives you the idea. You just use a pen to fill in the little circle next to the choice you want to make.

How would you do that if your eyes didn’t work?… 

Yeah, you’d probably have to have somebody do it for you. But what if you don’t have somebody you really trust to mark your ballot the way you want to? 

You could be losing your vote. Does that seem right? … 

With our technology today, we can create machines that allow people who are blind to vote privately and safely! 

There have been recent legal cases in Indiana and North Carolina forcing the states to do a better job of making those options available. 

Let me come back to our Gospel story, our Gospel drama, today. 

The story is playing around with the idea of being blind, unable to see. There’s a young man whose eyes don’t work.

But his heart and mind understand things just fine. 

And then there are also some people whose eyes work, but they don’t see what’s right in front of them. 

Their minds are made up and their hearts are closed and nothing is going to change how they see things. 

At first, they don’t believe that the man was really healed. They think it’s a trick or a mistake.

And then they’re convinced that the man was healed,

and they know that that was a wonderful, amazing miracle –

but they can’t see what that means about Jesus. 

That Jesus does good things because Jesus is good;

that Jesus does powerful, holy things because he is God’s Son. 

They don’t believe it, so they can’t see it. 

I think one thing this story wants us to carry away is to keep our eyes open, as we go through life – not just the eyes in our faces, but also the eyes in our minds and our hearts. 

Be willing to see things that surprise and challenge us. 

Be ready to learn, and to have our minds changed. 

Look for goodness wherever it shows up, because all goodness points to God. 

I also think this story can invite us to think about disability.

And how disability lives between a person and their environment. 

I wonder who really needed to be healed, in this story: The man who was born blind, or the people around him who thought he was less important, and that he didn’t have anything to offer to his community, because his eyes didn’t work. 

I am learning about disability.

I am trying to pay attention to my words and my thoughts and to the assumptions I make about people whose bodies or minds are different in certain ways.

I wonder how our church could be more truly welcoming and inclusive of people with differences and disabilities, and how we could help speak up for their needs, too. 

If you have ideas, or if you want to wonder with me, let’s talk. 

Thank you to our actors! … 

Read John chapter 11 here. 

1. The raising of Lazarus – next of our extended scenes from John’s Gospel. 
   1. Following Nicodemus’ visit and Photini, the woman at the well. 
   2. I learned in seminary that there’s a view that the Jesus of John’s Gospel is very unemotional, impassive – doesn’t seem to suffer or struggle, even on the cross. 
      1. I wonder if that’s true to John’s Gospel or to how we read John’s Gospel.
         1. Humor and wordplay that we easily miss because we’re not looking for it; emotion too? 
   3. But even if you see John’s Jesus as a very stoic figure, this story a big exception, because it contains what is famously the shortest verse of Scripture: Jesus wept. 
   4. So let’s talk about feelings, emotions, in this Gospel story. 

2. Mary and Martha’s Feelings
   1. Interesting overlap between John and Luke – many differences, but both have stories about Jesus’ friendship with sisters Mary and Martha. 
      1. Luke 10: Martha is busy preparing a meal for an honored guest; Mary sits at Jesus’ feet listening.
      2. Lots to say about that story – mention it because dynamics of sisters seem to match John’s account.
         1. Martha: trying to hold it together and make sense of things, come to some sense of peace that will help her move forward.
         2. Mary: overwhelmed with emotion, weeping at Jesus’ feet. 

2. 2. Both sisters start their dialogue with Jesus the same way: Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. 
      1. Tendency to read it backwards from resurrection – Lazarus’, and Jesus’. Sad, but calm. Anticipating grief resolved and transformed. 
      2. What if we read it as angry? Even as bitter? 
      3. (Read it a couple of times)

2. 3. If you attend funerals with any regularity, part of this passage may be familiar.
      1. Jesus’ dialogue with Martha is a funeral gospel.
      2. Appropriate and powerful.
         1. Martha is a lot like us, when we’re dealing with a death. 
         2. Strives to trust in resurrection. But also – like us – she grieves an immediate loss. 
         3. Swanson: “[Martha] sees to the heart of things: of course she trusts that the dead will be raised… She expects that God will regather all the faithful and balance all accounts… But she also knows that [an eventual] general resurrection has no immediate impact on the fact of bereavement.  Lazarus, her brother is dead.  Trust in God’s ultimate balancing of accounts does not dull the slicing agony of losing him.”
         4. [breath pause]
      3. Martha’s bereavement is unexpectedly reversed. But her feelings, in this moment, are so true, so real. 
      4. Jesus’ response – pointing to a life beyond this world. A life in God beyond earthly death. 
      5. Martha’s response – she doesn’t say, Yes, I believe that. She says, I believe in You, Jesus. Her trust, her hope, her comfort is not in abstract ideas or doctrinal teachings but in her friend, whom she also knows as her Messiah. 

3. Jesus’ Feelings. 
   1. There’s a LOT about Jesus’ emotions in this passage!
      1. He loves Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. A close friendship – attested in two quite different gospels. 
      2. Other than that, through the conversation with Martha, he sounds pretty calm: Johannine impassive Jesus. 
      3. But then Mary throws herself at his feet, weeping, and the group that gathered to console the sisters are also weeping, and things get interesting. 
   2. NRSV, verse 33: “When Jesus saw [Mary] weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” [repeat]
      1. Sounds like a fancy way of saying he was really sad. 
      2. David Bentley Hart: “He groaned in his spirit and yielded himself to his turmoil.” 
      3. Richard Swanson: “Jesus snorted in disgust in breath, and shuddered.” 
         1. Quoting Swanson at length: “The word [translated as groans] … is generally translated so that the audience is given a glimpse into the tender inner workings of Jesus’ heart.  He feels bad that Lazarus is dead.  He even cries. What a guy. But the word does not refer to tender inner feelings. The word, [embrimaomai],  refers to the snorting of a warhorse. It should generally be translated as “snorted in anger.”  Inner feelings, especially in the face of bereavement, are surely difficult to express, and even harder to translate, but the word will carry with it a note of anger, disgust, even.” 
            1. (1) Suggests that translations that smooth this over are editing the Bible to match their ideas of who Jesus ought to be and what he ought to be feeling. 
            2. (2) Anybody who’s lost a loved one knows that people’s emotions around a death can be quite complicated and intense! 
         2. Swanson continues: “Jesus snorts in anger, maybe even in disgust.  Why? One possibility is that [being] scolded by Martha… drove him over the edge.  He was angry, and the storyteller shows us the anger… Another possibility is that Jesus is angry with himself.” 
            1. (1) Swanson says there’s a prefix on the word that points it inward. 
            2. (2) “Such a reading would give us a Jesus who has just now realized the real-world, real-sister impact of his choice to delay,  It is a fine thing to do things so that ‘the Son of God may be glorified.’  It is another thing to crash two sisters hard into raw grief that he could have prevented.”

3. 3. Circling us back to the beginning of this passage and Jesus’ decision not to rush to Bethany, upon hearing that Lazarus is ill.  
      1. Church’s teaching: Jesus fully human and fully divine. 
         1. Does that mean his knowledge, understanding, and decisions are always perfect? 
         2. Or was part of the point of becoming human, for God to understand us better by living a limited, uncertain, vulnerable life like ours? 
         3. Did being fully human mean for Jesus, as it surely does for us, that sometimes we don’t understand the implications of our choices and actions? Sometimes we regret things done and left undone? 
      2. The story invites us to assume Jesus always planned to resurrect Lazarus, to raise him from the dead. 
         1. He’s healed the sick before. Time to go big. 
         2. How to interpret his delay: Either he knows about the sisters’ grief and doesn’t care, because his agenda of escalating miracles is more important; OR … he doesn’t really understand the stakes until he’s face to face with it. Until he sees Martha’s anger and Mary’s tears. 

3. 3. 3. Which Jesus do you prefer? Which Jesus is easier to love, to trust? 
         1. For me, it’s the Jesus who has a great plan… and doesn’t fully recognize its costs until he sees his friends in pain. 
         2. And I think the plain reading of this passage fits this understanding of Jesus. A Jesus who learns, changes, and grows – as fully human, and fully divine. 
         3. This is why – in that famously brief verse – Jesus weeps. The enormity, the absoluteness of loss, when experienced from the human, earthly side of things, has just dawned on him. He finally knows – finally feels – what it’s like to lose someone, for good. He weeps. 

4. Let me say one more thing, briefly, about where this story fits in our trajectory towards Holy Week. 
   1. We have switched the order of our Gospel passages for this week and next week, so that our kids can work with the story of the Man Born Blind in All Ages Worship next week.
   2. For John, this story leans heavily towards the cross. Listen to the verses that immediately follow it: 
      1. “Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him. But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what he had done. So the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the council, and said, ‘What are we to do? This man is performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.’  But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, ‘You know nothing at all! You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.’ … So from that day on they planned to put him to death…” 
   3. Jesus enters Jerusalem for Passover, greeted by excited crowds, in the next chapter. We are close to the endgame. 
   4. Orthodox churches observe Lazarus Saturday, the day before Palm Sunday –  because this miracle, and the reaction against it as told by John, so clearly pivot the Gospel towards its final and necessary chapter. 
   5. I’m a little sorry to disrupt that escalation by moving this story earlier. But maybe it’s not so bad. 
      1. Palm Sunday and Good Friday can come at us fast. 
      2. Not always time to take in how quickly and completely the tide turns against Jesus. 
      3. So this year, at least, we are taking a little extra time to know where all this is leading. 
      4. Next week we’ll hear about another disruptive miracle next week, with an awareness of the deepening shadow of fear and judgment hanging over Jesus. 
      5. Let’s continue the journey, friends. 

Richard Swanson on Jesus’ snorting in anger:

https://provokingthegospel.wordpress.com/2017/03/29/a-provocation-the-fifth-sunday-in-lent-april-2-2017-john-111-45/

NOTE: Due to travel this week, my sermon is an outline rather than a full text. I know this makes it harder to read; sorry!

Read the Gospel text here. 

1. INTRO
   1. Never really preached this
   2. Overwhelming text; lifetime of sermons
   3. Can only say one or two things today! 

2. The Woman
   1. Foil for Nicodemus, prev chapter
   2. Man/woman
   3. Midnight/noon
   4. Insider (Jew)/outsider (Samaritan – worse than Gentile) 
      1. Dynamics of mutual dislike
   5. High status/low status
      1. What to make of her marital status. 
      2. Who divorced who? 
      3. Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe 
      4. How is she seen? How does she see herself? 
         1. “Come see this man who told me everything I’ve ever done!” 

2. 6. Final contrast with N: She asks questions! She pushes back! Where N shuts up/shuts down. 
      1. Commentator: Jesus kind/patient with her. 
         1. I think he likes this give and take. 

3. LISTEN to the exchange. 
   1. DEFAULT “reading the Bible out loud in church” style. How we usually read Scripture. 

3. 2. Urgency. The woman is a seeker, looking for something she can’t find – big questions, deep yearnings. Jesus longs to connect with her, offer her wholeness and hope. 

3. 3. The third time, read it as a flirtation. Wells are places of romantic encounter.
      1. Richard Swanson names this as a possible reading, and it works. 
      2. He calls this scene part theological seminar and part flirtation. 
      3. This will be uncomfortable!  But it is NOT in fact heresy. Mystical traditions… if God is love then all forms of love are God’s.

4. What’s the point of the exercise?… 
   1. Dialogues in John: Getting to know Jesus. 
      1. Breaking from usual church “Jesus voice” to explore. 
      2. None of these readings are outside the possibilities of the text we receive; others may well be possible as well.

5. New idea for me: Significance of this story for the church at time when it was written down. 
   1. Specifically, for the Johannine Community. 
   2. Gospel of John – “Beloved Disciple” – John in other Gospels. 
   3. Big differences from other Gospels; diff understanding of Jesus’ teachings & mission 
   4. Community gathered around BD/John early on; shared and taught them; became a distinct group, recording a distinct witness. 

6. So: what was the importance of this story for the Johannine Community? 
   1. BRIEF look at some big ideas; I have just scratched surface myself! 
   2. Raymond Brown: Story explains presence of Samaritan converts in Johannine community.
   3. JC might have had an earlier understanding/lived experience of Jesus’ mission to ALL people than the rest of the church – 
      1. which tied in with a higher Christology, universal/cosmic significance of Jesus – 
      2. Both early non-Jew members & early high Christology could have pushed JC away from mainstream early church understanding of Jesus and ecclesiology.

6. 4. LIKEWISE, story might have justified role of women as evangelists. Clues: 
      1. “Come and see!” – John 1, Jesus gathering disciples – invitation to discipleship. 

6. 4. 2. “Many believed because of her testimony” – Sharing testimony that leads others to belief is a core mission for John’s Gospel. Repeated theme.  She lives it out! 

6. 5. SO: Perhaps JC had non-Jews & women evangelists; perhaps this story – whether recording a memory or tradition, or not – was important because it explained and justified those distinctivenesses. 

7. Importance of story for OUR faith community?
   1. Big question!! Lots of possible directions. 
   2. Today, one thing: Jesus wants to be in conversation with us.
   3. Might sound weird and abstract. I mean it as literally as possible given that Jesus is not usually physically present in this world. 
      1. I’ve had a number of conversations with Jesus over the course of my life. (In some sense my whole life so far is one long, often very slow conversation with Jesus.)
      2. Through Scripture, prayer, often other people, sometimes signs or moments of insight, sometimes a voice within or just a deep knowing. 
      3. Not as direct as talking with another human; but not metaphorical. I’m talking about asking Jesus about the things that I struggle with and yearn for and wonder about, and getting… sometimes answers, sometimes reframing or redirection or reassurance. 
      4. Personal relationship with Jesus – one of many things we’re not going to let evangelical Xty steal from the rest of us.  
         1. Know it may be triggering idea for some, and just plain alien for others. 
         2. How can I help? … 

7. 3. 5. One upshot of these intimate, personal conversations in John (Nic & the Woman, so far): Jesus cares about individual people. 
         1. Wants to hear their questions; name needs; push towards new understandings. 
         2. Not put off by challenges or questions. 
         3. Nothing about who we are or what we’ve done keeps him from wanting to talk about our big questions, daily struggles and joys. 

7. 4. Only one way this text might speak, but significant: Help us to imagine – to recognize – that Jesus sits down at the kitchen table in our hearts, asks us for a glass of water, and then waits to see what happens next.