April 3, 2005
Reading: John 21: 1-14
Rev. Stephen H. Phelps
Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus.
When the fishing disciples see the man on the beach but do not know who he is; when Mary Magdalene sees the risen One, and supposes him to be the gardener; when two disciples that Easter afternoon invite their companion of the road to their Emmaus home, but do not recognize him–the early church is telling us something we will always need to hear. Jesus Christ cannot be seen with the eye of the flesh–never could be, never will be.
The church of the first century needed to hear this because on every street corner, some fanatic was hawking promises of Jesus’ instant return in living flesh. One of the reasons the church of the twenty-first century needs to hear this is that on every street corner, someone is hawking demands that living flesh must be preserved at all costs; that no one has a right to die; that the will of Terry Schiavo, expressed through her husband, should have been ignored, for every breath from a human body is sacred.
Let’s be clear. There is no is. Is is an odd word. Saying “This is that” doesn’t make it so; it only hides our weakness. “He is so insensitive,” someone growls behind another’s back. We speak like that to hide behind an illusion: that the world is just as we think it, and we are but the passive victims of its ills. How used to the stink of our izzes we grow. Read the “Letters to the Editor” of your favorite periodical with an ear for this little word, is. There, angry opinion tries to incinerate opponents with name-calling. “This is a travesty.” “That man is irresponsible.” Who is the authority here?
When Peter says to Jesus, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God,” Jesus answers, not with “You are right” but “Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.” [Mat 16.17] When it comes to truth worth seeing, always a voice intervenes–a calling, a directing, something inside–to move the eye of Spirit from within to say “I see.” First the not-seeing, then a calling, then “I see.” Whoever has genuinely experienced this perfect gift of God–the eye of Spirit–leaves off trying to force others to see as they see, because, as Paul wrote, “we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.” [2 Cor 4:18]
When the disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” this was the inward eye seeing, the eye of Spirit. So “when Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on some clothes, for he was naked, and jumped into the sea.” So also with us. We are naked, all of humanity–naked. So far as the eye of flesh is concerned, we are equal in our frailty and in our nakedness. Those to whom a new seeing has been revealed do not try to force others to put on the clothes with which they have been clothed–especially not by using the power of the state to dominate people by threat of damage or death. The laws of governments–this is a principle of America’s founding fathers–must be established not on revelation but on the basis of what all flesh can see with the ordinary eye.
I have always thought the Pope–bless his memory–was right to teach his great flock about the dignity of human life, from its very beginning to its very end; to commend utmost gratitude and seriousness in every intimate meeting of man and woman; to bend humbly, as he himself bent in these last days, to the strange power of suffering in life and in death. A spiritual teacher gives voice to what he has seen. This is good. But I have always thought the Pope wandered away from the Holy Spirit when he endorsed the making of laws in governments to punish those who do not see as he saw. Where, elsewhere on earth, the power of God in his voice flung open the prison doors of Eastern Europe, here, in matters of life and death, he bent his power to force a great dove to come down to earth as the machinery of prisons and threats against women and doctors and spouses. But this the Spirit will not do! The President and the Congress mislead this nation again and again when they seek to enforce in law what can only be revealed to the inward eye by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Is every human breath sacred? How would you know? From America’s love of war and its lonely pursuit of the death penalty? From the politicians’ preaching protection of life from the moment of conception right up to the moment of birth–but not a moment more, at least not for the poor? To hold a years-long vigil at the side of one from whom all signs of sense have fled may be a kind of compline and vespers for one who sees it so–a daily prayer before the mystery of creation. To refuse to let go of a senseless body may also be a sign of desperate disbelief in any reality except the material, the eye of flesh unwilling to yield to the Spirit, unable to trust anything but the flesh of nature. Which is right? What says your God, O naked one? Do not jump into the sea until you have heard a word in the Spirit. Then stand by the One you see, without judging or punishing anyone who does not see what is shown to you. Then the eye of Spirit is opening within you, and the eye of flesh, whose way is violence against others, is dying that Christ might rise.
In the language Jesus spoke–Aramaic–“is” isn’t, in the present tense. There is no word for “is” to couple a this and a that. Just a little space, a silence left for a possibility. Jesus does not say, “This is my body.” Rather: “This—my body broken for you. This—my blood shed for all.”
Did you hear? Do you see? Tell everyone. Forgive everyone.
delivered at Central Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, New York
©Stephen H. Phelps, April 2005
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