5 Easter, Year A

Acts 7: 55 – 60, Psalm 31: 1 – 5, 15 – 16; I Peter 2: 2 – 10, John 14: 1 - 14

 

A homily by: Fr. Gene Tucker
Given at: Trinity Church, Mt. Vernon, Illinois; Sunday, May 22, 2011

 

“KNOWLEDGE: HAVING IT AND USING IT”
(Homily texts: Acts 7: 55 – 60, I Peter 2: 2 – 10 & John 14: 1 – 14)

Last night, we attended the graduation of one of our young members from Mt. Vernon Township High School, Jackson Adams. It was a joy to see him walk across the stage and receive his diploma. As I listened to the comments of the student speakers, and watched the ceremonies, I reflected on my own graduation from high school (now many years ago), and I also reflected in this aspect of these young people’s lives as they graduated from high school:

They must:

• Know what they know, and 
• Know how to use the knowledge they have gained.

For us as Christians, the same two tasks are also critically important. We must:

• Be assured of the basic facts of the Christian faith, which derive from the revelation of God as we have received it in the person, life, work, teachings, suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord.
• Know how to apply this knowledge to the living out of the faith.

So let’s examine these two aspects of the Christian life and faith more closely. We will use Jesus’ own words, as we hear them this morning in John, chapter 14, as the basis for our examination.

“I am the way, the truth, and the life,” Jesus says to Thomas and the other disciples. Perhaps one of the most important verses in all of John’s gospel account, and one that is often quoted by Christians today.

Jesus’ statement about His being “the way” is related to His comments about His departure. I am about to leave you, He says in so many words, but I am “going to prepare a place for you.” He then adds a comment about the fact that the disciples “know the way where I am going.”

“The way”: Is the “way” a destination, or something else?

When Jesus’ words are read today, many Christians assume that the “way” is a destination, a place, heaven. After all, Jesus says that, “In my Father’s house, there are many rooms.”

Such a reading might be correct. Jesus says that He is going to prepare a “place” for his disciples.

But there’s another understanding of the text that is also important.

For Jesus to be the “way” also means that Jesus is the way to the Father. “He who has seen me has seen the Father,” Jesus says.

It’s all about relationship, in that case.

Jesus comes to show us the Father, to say to us everything that the Father Himself has told Jesus, the Son, to say (as we read elsewhere in John).

It is for this reason that Jesus can say, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father,” for “I and the Father are one.” (John 10: 30)

So, using the overall picture that the Fourth Gospel paints for us, this is – in summary – what we can say about what we know about Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, and therefore, what we know about the Father, as we see Him in the Son:

• The Son is sent by the Father, to be the one who “dwelled with us, full of grace and truth, and we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.” (John 1: 14)
• The Son is sent by the Father out of love for the world, and those who believe in the Son will receive eternal life (a summary of John 3: 16).
• The works that the Son does bear witness to His identity and to the His unity with the Father. “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me, or else believe me for the sake of the works themselves,” Jesus says today.

What I’ve offered by way of summary about Jesus Christ, His identity, His unity with the Father, His miraculous works which demonstrate the power of God which resides in Him, all of these a theologian would call the special revelation of God, known in Jesus Christ.

Now, the question arises: What do we do with the knowledge we have about God, known in Christ?

Several possibilities arise here.

Let’s begin with the negative possibility: We can use this knowledge as a weapon.

Allow me to explain.

If I say “Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life,” and act like I have some special knowledge that makes me better than someone else who doesn’t express that conviction, I am using the statement as a weapon. I can act as though I am superior, somehow, to others.

In similar fashion, I can believe that anyone who doesn’t express the faith exactly as I do is also not only wrong, but also is not really a Christian. Speaking personally, this was a major aspect of the Christian faith that I encountered as a child in the fundamentalist church in which I grew up in Nebraska. The impression I get from the way people who made up that church behaved was that they felt that anyone who expressed their Christian faith in any manner that was different than the way we expressed it was just plain wrong, just plain misguided in their thinking and believing. I’d like to think that my impressions and recollections are wrong about those days, but I don’t think they are. I confess that I struggle with these sorts of attitudes to this day, many decades later.

 

So, we can use our knowledge as a weapon, or we can use it as some sort of a special badge of honor.

 

But we can use the knowledge we have of Jesus Christ, and of God the Father, in other ways, and I think the examples we have in Holy Scripture of the original disciples, and of the early Christians, can inform our lives and behaviors quite well.

 

For example, we have before us the account of the martyrdom of St. Stephen, the Church’s first martyr and a Deacon. Stephen and the many others who were willing to give up their lives in defense of the faith were willing to sacrifice life itself for the sake of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In a real sense, this is humility at its clearest. The cause of Christ was so dear to these early martyrs that they were willing to lose their very lives for the sake of it.

So, these early witnesses (which is what the Greek word martyr actually means) lived out the Christian faith in humility.

 

Holding the faith in humility demands several things of us:

• We are to imitate Christ’s own servant model as we live out our lives. For Jesus Christ is the one who came among us, not to be served, but to serve.
• We are to learn all we can about the Lord’s ministry, teachings and life, in order to be Christ-like in all that we do and say. To do this imposes a significant burden. Living the Christian life is never easy.
• We are to recognize that the Christian life and faith that we hold is a generous and gracious gift from God. St. Peter, writing in his first letter to the early Church, expresses God’s action and initiative quite well as he writes, “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light…”

So, as we come to know God through Christ, more and more, daily walking in His footsteps, may we hold what God has enabled us to know with humility, recognizing that such knowledge is a generous gift from God. May we live out with our words and with our actions the reality that Christ dwells within, and that – by God’s grace – we have found Jesus Christ to be the way, the truth and the life.

 

AMEN.