Resurrection and Relationships

John 15.1-17

1 John 4.7-end

Preached Canberra Baptist Church 14 th may 2006

Above the M4 Western Motorway in Sydney stands an imposing Billboard: CAN YOU HANDLE THE TRUTH? it enquires. That’s a rather intriguing question for a preacher, so I read on: all it said was BB06. I turned to my wife (who is wise in the ways of this world) and asked “What on earth is BB06?”

Thus was I inducted into the wonders of Big Brother, a television program about people locked in a house with dozens of television cameras. I tuned in and watched people cleaning their teeth together, hugging each each other, sharing secrets and other silly or sordid domestic encounters. I have never watched a more contrived, vacuous or manipulative program. The truth according to BB06 appears to be that relationships are of a series of banal, fumbling, and trivial interactions between people who happen to be locked together in the same house. Advertising is often very truthful – even prophetic. When BB06 asks ‘Can you handle the truth?’ it’s expressing a deep value that the program is portraying. The message of Big Brother is that relationships really are about the sort of thing that happen in the Big Brother house. The program says that the truth about relationships is that they are an adolescent fumbling toward intimacy, friendship and communion. Some of us might do it with a little more style but the same clumsy dynamics, the same claustrophobic feeling of being trapped, is the reality of relationships. They are tawdry and opportunistic and competitive and probably, in the end, untrustworthy.

Now if this makes you feel quite depressed, then I recommend a trip on the M7, because somewhere along that journey one sees another billboard with another message: SEEK THE TRUTH! Now this ad is spruiking a movie called “The Da Vinci Code”, which we will be able to see later this week. Now if you haven’t read the book and don’t want me to spoil the end of the movie look away now, because this movie is built on a very old idea that Jesus didn’t really die on the Cross and experience Resurrection. According to this story, he somehow survived the Cross, recovered, married Mary Magdalene, had a child and lived to a ripe old age. His descendents are now among us. The church is meant to be in some intricate conspiracy to keep us from working it all out.

The Da Vinci Code has been criticized for many things – especially for creating an air of conspiracy around the church which is entirely unwarranted, and also for debasing and bringing down the example of Jesus. But it is possible to read the plot as lifting up, as ennobling, a pattern of life that some have seen as being belittled by the early church – the path of marriage and childbirth.

The Da Vinci Code suggests that Jesus’ final destiny, his great accomplishment, was the same as the destiny of many of us: the domestic relationships of marriage and family. It suggests that the Incarnation, God taking flesh among us, implies the sharing of all of life, family included. It can be read as an exalted vision of what relationships might be. The story takes us through the great art galleries and grand abbeys of this world to teach us this great truth, that at the heart of our culture there is only the love of a man and a woman, and the gift of child.

On this reading, there is something special about the married estate and the role of parenting. You’re somehow, subtlely, more fully human that people who are single or childless. There are single people, childless people, in the church who will tell you that they experience this often. Their friendship, their place in the life of the community is somehow less valuable, less significant, less OK than that of couples or families.

If Big Brother says the truth about relationships is that they belong at the lowest common denominator of human life, the Da Vinci Code, points to relationships being amongst the highest aspirations of human life, something that even Jesus found so fulfilling there was no other destiny to which he would aspire.

In the contemporary world both views about relationships have an element of truth. There is profound cynicism, a la Big Brother, that sees them as very ordinary, not particularly special, open to manipulation and rather opportunistic. When you get fed up with people you kick them out of your house or your life. Relationships on this reading are intrinsically competitive, as we try to be liked, to be popular, so as to survive the vote to expel. This common format across so many reality shows, where people voted off the island, ‘fired’ from the firm, or expelled from the house, reflects the underlying uncertainty we experience in relationships, the sense that things are never quite permanent. It is easy to be lulled into a cynicism about relationships, seeing only self-interest, clumsiness and unappealing behaviour in our friends or partners.

This reflects the necessary process by which relationships are formed – the principle of reciprocity, or give and take. What’s being documented in the big brother house is the many little interactions by which trust is offered and tested, in which people give and receive from each other and then expect some form of reciprocal gift. As partnerships and friendships are tried out under the glare of the cameras, forming and unraveling and reforming and being overlaid with other meanings and alliances, we sense the complexity of our own lives.

And there is high romanticism about relationships, especially about marriage and family. Western societies have invested heavily in the idea that relationships are a channel of personal fulfillment, even of self-transcendence. A movie like “As Good As it Gets” makes the point succinctly in the title: although love may be less than optimal, it is still the highest bliss and path of fulfillment a person can find. Every relationship has its mountain top experiences. We can be duped into the high romantic view of relationships, that they are the peak experience that will lead us into personal growth and complete fulfillment.

And we can find ourselves sliding between these experiences, between the truth we are challenged to handle (that relationships are shabby and expendable) and the truth that we are invited to seek (that relationships are the high point of human experience).

But are these really ‘truths’ or are they ‘temptations’? We are followers of Jesus! What difference does Jesus and his resurrection make to our experience of relationships? In the two New Testament passages we have heard today there are common themes and an exploration of the love that Jesus commands us. Like much of John’s theology it is tightly packed and I want to point to four themes in the text, and see how they affect our experience of relationships.

The first is the central injunction to abide in Christ. On the night before his death Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Abide in me, remain in me, apart from me you can do nothing. If you abide in me you will bear much fruit. Relationship with Jesus will be possible. Using the metaphor of the vine and the branches, Jesus encourages them to remain joined to him.

The second theme is this: to abide in Christ is to abide in love. We know we are abiding in Christ when we are able to love. Loving and being ‘in Christ’ are somehow connected. When we love, we know God and God knows us. Our capacity for relationship is grounded in our experience of Jesus.

A third love them is that love always starts with God:

I no longer call you servants, I call you friends ... you did not choose me, but I chose you! (John 15.15-16)

In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins (1 John 4.10)

Far from being reciprocal, the love of God on which our loving is founded is entirely asymmetric. It is not balanced: it is tilted overwhelmingly in the favour of human beings. If you read the Bible you see that the love God has for humanity is not a delicately balanced and reciprocal love that has emerged from the beginning of history with both sides gradually learning to love each other. No. Human beings have wandered away, not been interested, have had love affairs with other gods and idols. It is God who has loved us and followed us and sought us.

The final theme is this: the sign of God’s presence with us is the Spirit. ‘By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.’ (1 Jn 4.13) In John’s gospel, the Risen Christ breathes his spirit on the disciples. The presence of the Spirit is the pledge of the risen Christ and his power within the community. The presence of the Spirit is the proof of the resurrection, and the power of our loving.

If we know Jesus, we know we are loved, from the heart of the universe. It doesn’t matter if our relationships are affected by the triviality and pettiness that we see in a Big Brother world. We have known love outside of the kinds of play and counter-play that are involved in reciprocity. We know already that we are loved, and all the insecurities and little insults and slights that can bring ordinary love undone will not faze us.

Because the love that we know from God is asymmetric, is unbalanced and tipped in in our favour, we know that our own loving can never be the greatest thing in world, the absolute. We are delivered from the impossible expectations of a da Vinci coded world. There was a crucifixion and a resurrection, and in that love is fully seen. The temptation to see any human friendship or love or marriage or (dare I say it on Mothers Day) any human attachment or commitment as ultimate, is just that – a temptation to sin! The Cross and Resurrrection declare that all of us exist within the horizon of God’s love for us and its expression in Christ. That horizon of God’s love exists before and beyond all our relationships, as their light and their sign and their inspiration and their power.

We are in a society in which relationship is being asked to carry all sorts of meanings and fulfill all manner of functions. We live with the paradox of a truth we can’t handle (that relationships are clumsy and fragile and perhaps slightly ridiculous) and the truth we seek (that relationships are the highest form of human endeavour). Into that paradox the Resurrrection of Jesus says ‘I am present through the Spirit. If you don’t abide in me your life will be barren and fruitless. Abide in me and abide in love, that love that is asymmetric, over-balanced by God’s original, overwhelming love for you. Be held by this love and all you other loving will make sense, and bear fruit, and bring life’.

How do we know we are loved, and then learn to love? Today, of all days, we would affirm the place of Family of origin and the love of mother and father than sustained us all!

We also learn through practicing love, friends and colleagues, boyfriends and girlfriends, wives and husbands, children and grandchildren.

Above all, we know we are loved and we learn to love, because of the love of God in Christ Jesus shown in the Cross, and present now through the Resurrection and the power of the Spirit with us.

The relationships that we build in the world - relationships with friends, family, and colleagues – these are relationships that exclude the starving and suffering in Darfur, the dead and injured in Iraq, the powerful and vicious who contribute to this world sufferings. In the Big Brother House that is this Earth our attempts at trust and kindness and true community collapse back into the chaos of selfishness and insecurity.

All the romantic glamour of lavish palaces and fancy meetings in which the world elites play the game that their relationships will save us, do not come near solving the problems and the sufferings of this world. ‘Relationship’ on that scale is either a failure or a delusive game.

But the love of God holds and sustains and yearns for all such victims. It redeems, and challenges, and calls us out of all the Big Brother antics we indulge in. And it exposes all the romantic games of the powerful and the rich that suggest that relationships will save us. It reminds us that the price of salvation is the Cross. That love is costly but freely bestowed. That the great lover is risen, and present with us, that his love holds us all, and can empower our own loving.

Without Jesus we are left fumbling and faintly ridiculous world of Big Brother or in the grand puzzle of the da Vinci code, where nothing is what it seems and we are endlessly running through empty churches and locked galleries. But with Jesus we are grounded in the wonder of a God who is love, and whose love holds every human being tenderly, patiently, longingly. Can you handle that truth? Will you seek the truth? Jesus promised that those who seek will find, and those who ask will receive, and to those who knock the door will be opened.