Beyond Troubled Hearts and GPS
John 14:1-14 (Easter 5a)
I am indebted for the opening of what I am about to say today to Dr. David Lose, a Lutheran Theological Professor in Minnesota.
If you could only ask God one question, what would it be?
Questions, of course, are an essential ingredient of everyday conversation. They serve as invitations to dialogue and opportunities for further learning. Little wonder, then, that questions sit at the center of John's Gospel. At the outset of the story, Andrew asks Jesus where he's staying. Shortly thereafter, Nicodemus inquires how a grown man can climb back into his mother's womb, and the Samaritan women wants to know where she can get this living water Jesus is talking about. And on it goes, as Peter, Pilate and all kinds of others all ask Jesus questions that give him, in turn, a chance to teach more deeply the truth he has come to reveal.
Of all the questions in John's Gospel, however, the ones asked in this Sunday's gospel reading may just be the hardest to answer. Certainly they are among the most embarrassing.
Maybe I should explain.
At this point in the story, it's Thursday evening, the night before Jesus' crucifixion. In John's account, Jesus not only knows that he will soon leave this world but also tries to prepare his disciples for the events about to transpire. In fact, after the last supper he shares with his friends, Jesus spends the next four chapters of John's Gospel talking about his imminent departure, and these verses come right at the beginning of that long and dramatic scene. A few moments earlier Jesus told them that one of them would soon betray him, and now he's just told Peter that he will deny him three times. It's in this context that Jesus says, as we just heard, "Do not let your hearts be troubled."
"What?" The disciples must have asked. "Do not let our hearts be troubled? Are you kidding us? You've just told us you're going to die." No doubt most of us can intuitively understand what they're going through, because each of us has had those moments, too, when our hearts were not only deeply troubled, but downright disturbed, even anguished. Yet Jesus asks his disciples not just to believe in him but to trust him, to commit their futures to him.
Then, before you know it, he moves on, talking about going away, preparing places, and coming back. As if to add insult to injury, he implies that they should know what's he talking about; he actually says that they know the way to follow. To which Thomas – brave, realistic Thomas – asks another of those questions, "But, Jesus, actually, we don't even know where you're going, how then can we know the way." And when Jesus says he is the way, and asks again that they trust him, Philip can stand it no longer and asks the one question no faithful Jew should ever ask. Actually, it's a statement, a request, a plea, maybe even a demand, but underneath it all is a question: "Show us the Father," Philip says, "and we will be satisfied." Or, to put it more directly, "What does God look like?"
John doesn't record this, but I suspect there's a bit of a collective gasp on the part of the other disciples when Philip asks this hard question. In ancient Israel, you see, it was simply understood that no one can see God and live. Moses, the model of heroic faith in the Old Testament, once made a similar request, and God put him face-forward in the cleft of a mountain and passed by and all Moses could see was the glory of the Lord shimmering around him. He was finally allowed to turn around and look only after God has passed by, so that Moses ultimately saw only the trail of the Lord's glory or, more literally in the Hebrew, Moses could only see God's backside.
God is too much, you see, for us to bear – too holy, too powerful, too infinite, too full of potential and life and the future for any mere mortal to behold and live. And yet Philip asks to see God anyway. "If you want us to trust you, Jesus, just show us the Father." That is, "What does God look like?"
It's an audacious, even inappropriate question, but again I suspect we can understand where it came from. Because each of has been there, too: at our wits end, desperate for some hope that things will get better, for some reason to believe that this tragedy is not all there is. Maybe it was when you walked into the children's hospital and were confronted with the unbelievable mortality of infants. And you wonder, where is God in any of that? Show us something God, something of yourself, so that we know all this stuff about your love, about death and resurrection isn't just some fairy tale that vanishes like a mirage in the face of suffering and death.
Or maybe we ask, we demand to see God when we are confronted with the tragedy of others. Floods in Manitoba where farmers are being wiped out. Fires at the same time around Slave Lake when people's homes and livelihoods vanish into mere ashes. Show yourself then God. And we will believe, we will be satisfied.
How might Jesus respond to such pleas? He speaks to Philip. "Have I been with you all this time Philip and you still do not know me?" Has Jesus been with us all this time – and we still do not know him/ trust him, see his work around and even within us?
Keep in mind that in the story John tells we are on the eve of the crucifixion. Jesus is about to be betrayed, abandoned, handed over, tried, insulted, beaten, and then crucified, nailed to a cross and hung there to die. Why? To appease the righteous anger of a just God? To set for us some kind of example of what real faith looks like? To take the just punishment we deserve? No! Jesus goes to the cross for one reason and one reason only: to show us God, to show us God's grace and mercy, to show just how much God loves us and how far God will go to communicate that love to us that we might believe and, "believing, have life in his name".
Like those early disciples we too will have times when our hearts are greatly troubled, broken, ripped apart. To belittle that is to have no heart, no acknowledgment of the reality of our mortality, of the depths of human brokenness. We must never be ashamed of our questions, of our heartache. They are real. And God knows them. Jesus' own heart was broken.
So let's not be afraid to ask our questions, sometimes even to make demands. But let us also by God's grace be open to Jesus' response. He shows us the Father in His life, suffering, death and resurrection. He loves us. He cares for all. And – He calls us to follow Him in caring for others, in serving others, in listening to others.
I remember being in Children's Hospital for a week when our youngest daughter was only a year old. We marvelled at the care our nurses gave. One morning I asked the young nurse. How do you do this? How do you come here day after day to care for kids like our little girl – when they are so much pain, when too often they don't survive. She looked at me and smiled and said, "Mr. Le Drew at this point in my life I don't have any children at home of my own. Maybe later I will. But right now – these kids are my kids – and I give them everything I have while I am here."
Have you been watching the pictures from Slave Lake or the pictures of the flood waters in Manitoba and Saskatchewan? People – locals and from far away have come to help – with actions, with donations.
We may say, we might even feel a desperate need to see the Father. Jesus has shown us the way – and calls others, who consciously or unconsciously follow. May we in the midst of our questions, our troubled hearts see that "the Father", although invisible and so totally beyond our simple grasp is revealed in this Jesus. Sometimes the "Father" is glimpsed even in those who follow Jesus' way of love and service. By God's grace may we be numbered among them: questions, struggles and all. Amen.