Wednesday, May 13, 2020

Scripture for the Day
John 8:31-38

I know we’re not supposed to play favorites, especially with Holy Scripture, but the Gospel of John is not my favorite gospel. It hasn’t been for a while. And some of this, admittedly, is a matter of comparison. I prefer Mark’s mysterious, even enigmatic, portrait of Jesus to John’s in your face, isn’t-it-so-obvious account of his life and divinity. I find Matthew’s recounting of Jesus’s teaching to be more instructive, and certainly more straightforward, than the way in which John’s Jesus speaks in long discourses filled with metaphorical and symbolic language. In Luke, Jesus’s invitation to table fellowship is surprisingly wide, and it includes both the rich and the poor, those who have power and those on the margins; in John, the invitation seems far more narrow and exclusive. 

But it’s not just about comparison or preference. Some of John just seems more problematic. John deals in strict binaries: good and bad, light and darkness, salvation and destruction, sight and blindness, freedom and slavery. There is little ambiguity, little room, it seems, for the complexity of lived experience. John seems to reduce discipleship to a matter of belief; you’re “in” if you can mentally affirm certain things about Jesus, and you’re “out” if you can’t. 

And then there’s John’s portrait of the “Jews.” The Greek word for Jews (Ioudaios) occurs seventy times in John’s Gospel, a huge number in comparison to the five occurrences each in the gospels of Matthew and Luke and the seven occurrences in the Gospel of Mark. In John, the Jews are more than Jesus’s intellectual sparring partners. They are portrayed as a threat to him and to his disciples, and ultimately John places responsibility for Jesus’s death squarely on their shoulders. The depiction of the Jews in the Gospel of John has been used to justify unthinkable violence against our Jewish brothers and sisters. 

In short, I find that John’s gospel often requires a lot more interpretive work. While the Greek of John is relatively simple, discerning exactly what a passage means is more difficult. And that is true of our passage for today. 

The passage moves from good to bad to really bad quite quickly. The passage opens on a positive note: Jesus is speaking with some Jews who had come to believe in him. This is a big deal. Jesus’s opponents seem to be moving in the right direction. But before you know it, they show that they don’t actually understand Jesus or his teaching. By the end of the chapter, they are picking up stones to try to kill Jesus. 

As I have wrestled with this passage over the last few days, I have asked God to show me how this passage can lead to our transformation. I am not satisfied with a surface-level reading of the text that demonizes the Jewish people while giving Christians a sense of pious self-assurance because we’ve checked the right boxes in the belief column. So, how can we read ourselves into this text more effectively? 

I think this passage asks one fundamental question of us: how are we bound? To what are we slaves? In the passage, Jesus’s conversation partners deny the possibility of their own bondage. Ignoring God’s great work in delivering the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt, they assert that they’ve never been slaves to anyone. And we too may assert our own autonomy and independence. We might point to how boldly we exercise our rights or boast in our financial independence. In the age of Covid-19, some celebrate their freedom from fear or government overreach. We are not slaves to anything or anyone. We live in the land of the free, after all. 

But like the characters in our passage, we deceive ourselves if we do not think we are bound. Bondage today can take many forms. Some are bound to their schedules. Others are bound by the expectations of others. Emotional pain or trauma from the past entrap. The narratives that we tell ourselves about our worth or our potential limit how we engage the world and those around us. We can be slaves to our smartphones and our bank accounts. Counting calories and watching our weight can be just as unforgiving a master as our overindulgence with alcohol or food. 

Jesus’s words in John 8 invite us to tell the truth about ourselves and those things to which we are bound. Jesus tells us that such truth-telling is liberating: “You will know the truth and the truth will make you free.” This is one of the reasons I have always loved the Prayer of Confession in the Reformed worship tradition. It invites us to an honest assessment of ourselves and our ways of being in the world. We practice telling the truth about ourselves, not to earn God’s forgiveness or because God does not already know these truths, but because we are prone to deception, and deception leads to our bondage. The good news of this passage is found in verse 36: “So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” Jesus offers us freedom from anything and everything that might bind us. May we all live into the freedom that Christ offers. And as Paul reminds the Galatians (Gal 5:13), may the only limit to our freedom be our loving consideration of and service to others. Amen.