Today is Pentecost Sunday. It’s also Easter—in the Church Year, the eighth and last Sunday of the Easter season. But then every Sunday is Easter.
Today the focus is on the Spirit. Tongues of fire blaze on the gathered disciples of Jesus (Acts 2), Babel is reversed (Genesis 11), and God breathes new life into creation (Psalm 104). We are ready to step off into ordinary time—in all the senses of “ordinary.”
Before we do so, take a moment to look back. We began eight weeks ago with Mary Magdalene alone in the garden. It’s a romantic beginning: Jesus appearing to the lonely contemplative weeping at the empty tomb. We sing still, even if we think the song a bit trashy, “I come to the garden alone when the dew is still on the roses.” We stand where Mary stood. In our imagination at least, we have seen the risen Jesus, touched him, heard his voice call our name. The real Easter, we think.
But that is not where the gospel readings leave us, not in the garden with Mary. We end where we were two weeks ago in John 14 considering again the post-ascension community of faith: the Spirit animated gospel fellowship. Sunday by Sunday Jesus appears to us in the worshiping community. The question hovering over John 14 is whether this Jesus is also real, whether this is also really Easter.
In the John 14 discourse, Jesus says yes. The Sunday morning appearance of Jesus is no less real than Jesus appearing to Mary in the garden.
The issue is pressed first by Philip, who asks not to see Jesus, who is standing in front of him, but to see the Father—to see God, reprising an issue already much debated in the book of Exodus. Jesus responds, with no little pique in his voice, that to have seen him is to have seen the Father. The Father, he says repeatedly in this passage, is in what he, Jesus, says and does.
But then Jesus presents the next question, the Easter question: how will we see him after the events of that first Easter week? Are we reliant only on the original witnesses and an occasional outlier like Paul? Jesus answers in what seems to me to be a theology of worship, perhaps the theology of worship that informed the Johannine community that lies behind the Gospel.
It begins, “When you love me. . .” (John 14:15). “When,” as Frederick Dale Bruner has it in his commentary on John, not “if,” as our English translations prefer. This love is something you do, as in worship.
But press on: “When you love me and keep my commands. . .” (reading with P66, Codex Sinaiticus and Raymond Brown). The commands here must above all be the community commands in the previous chapter to love one another (see 13:14, 31-35). This is the Easter requirement: love, for Jesus and each other.
“Then,” Jesus goes on, “I will ask the Father, and he will send to you another [besides me] to come alongside you [Greek paraklētos], to be with you forever, the Spirit of truth whom the outside world cannot receive, because they see and know nothing of the Spirit, but you know, for this is the Spirit that abides alongside you and will be in you.” It’s the presence of the Spirit that issues in the Easter promise: “Those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and appear to them” (21).
This appearing is really Easter. Those who limit Easter to the bodily appearances of Jesus slight this promise of Jesus: “I will appear to them.” The sequence throughout this chapter is doing and seeing. In the doing of what Jesus commands, especially in worship, we should expect to see him. And this is the work of the Spirit.
A few weeks ago, I met on Zoom with a few friends. We do this every month. We have been carrying on a conversation about faith and the church and our own lives for many years. The topic for this time was how we pass on the faith from generation to generation. The answer we came to is framed by doing and watching.
For the doing, we focused on worship, but of course it’s broader than that. We—you and I—practice the faith in a thousand ordinary ways. We pray. We sing. We listen. We talk. We read. We reach out to others with the love of Jesus. We give of our time and our money. These and other practices become the stuff of faith. Faith is this doing.
And they watch: our children, others in the community, even our neighbors who don’t go to church. They watch and learn and one day join us in the ancient practices of the faith, reciting the Lord’s Prayer and the Nicene Creed, singing songs old and new, listening to the scriptures, listening to how the scriptures are understood and practiced, taking a meal to someone who needs it, writing a check to the church, joining others in ministries of love and justice, and more. Direct instruction is important, but the faith is mostly caught in the doing and watching.
We may think this is ordinary. Just doing church. But when we do it, the most extraordinary thing happens, as extraordinary as Jesus showing up in the garden for Mary or in the locked room for Thomas: we see Jesus. It’s Easter all over again.
One Response
This is very good, that Pentecost is the fullness of Easter.