Rise, Let Us Be On Our Way
Pentecost Sunday, Year C
"O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
W. B. Yeats, “Among School Children”Some moments both encapsulate everything that has come before them and change all that will follow, while provoking emotions from anxiety to zest. Your parents drop you off for the first day of school, and, when you turn around, they’re gone. You pose at the bottom of the steps before walking the stage to get your high school diploma. You wait in the narthex of the church, just before the organist launches into Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March.” You hold hands with your partner in a cab on the way to the maternity ward, your firstborn straining to make his or her own entrance. You sit in ICU stroking your aged parent’s hair, on the threshold of a different transition.
Sometimes we sense the moment’s place in a bigger picture. This is what it must be like to wait under the grandstand of Wimbledon Center Court, preparing to step out into the June sunlight in the footsteps of Rod Laver and Billie Jean King, Roger Federer and the Williams sisters, or in the offstage darkness of Carnegie Hall, joining a procession of musical royalty from Bernstein to the Beatles. At other times, we’re so caught up in the emotions that we only contextualize them after the fact.
Chapters 13 and 14 of John’s gospel, from which this Sunday’s reading comes, capture a moment like that for Jesus’s apostles. They certainly know that something is up. Gathered in the upper room on Passover eve (itself the inflection point of Jewish history) Jesus mysteriously washes their feet, tells them that he will soon leave them, says that one of them will soon betray him, and admonishes Peter that he will that very night deny even knowing Jesus. This leads to Jesus’ famous “dwelling places” teaching. When Thomas, puzzled, asks “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus answers “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” When a similarly puzzled Philip asks Jesus to “show us the Father” Jesus says "Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves.” This does not seem to particularly enlighten Philip. Then, at the end of the chapter, Jesus says: “Rise, let us be on our way.” To Gethsemane, that is.¹
I sympathize with the apostles’ confusion. How can one house have many mansions? How can someone be both the means (“the way”) and the end (“the truth”)? Perhaps we need to set theology aside for a moment. Mario Aguilar, my comparative religion professor at St. Andrews, once quoted one of his professors that “Theology is useless.” When I asked Mario, in our afternoon tea break, whether “theology is useless” is itself a theological statement, he responded “No, it is a live statement.” This admitted of no further reply. (Mario, a Benedictine oblate, likely wanted to teach me a lesson in the value of silence. It worked.)
I have too many worthy theologian friends to endorse the idea that theology is “useless.” However, they would probably agree that there are limits to what theology can teach us about how to live. That is what Mario meant by a live statement, and that is what Jesus gives us here. I don’t need to “show you the Father,” Jesus says. Look at me, listen to me, and you will know the Father. If that’s not enough, just watch what I do. And above all, don’t be afraid. Jesus, wanting to make sure that his apostles get the point, invokes YHWH’s name “I Am” four times. Come and see, Jesus invites the apostles on their first meeting. Here I am, he says now. Join me and the Father, on our journey.
On this Passover eve, the apostles are both witnesses to and participants in the dawning of a new, redeemed age. When Jesus tells the apostles to rise and be on their way, they step out into three days of unimaginable pain, sorrow, confusion, and fear: Gethsemane, then Calvary, then the tomb. The apostles hide behind locked doors. But then the empty tomb opens out into a garden, there are rumors of Jesus sightings, and he walks through one of those locked doors. Try charting all that on an emotion wheel.
By virtue of the gospel, we get to be witnesses, and are invited to be participants, also. When Jesus says, “In my father’s house are many dwelling places,” perhaps he means house in the sense of clan or family, not structure: think the House of Windsor, or (more appropriately) the House of Israel. So, when Thomas asks for directions to this house, Jesus’s response is “I am the gathering place. I am the head of the house. Join me.” On Pentecost, the gift Jesus promised appears: the Holy Spirit, which binds the church, the House of God, across space and throughout time. It makes the church today the same church as the one 1900 years ago, and the church in South Texas the same as the ones in Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, in Chicago, London, Tanzania, and Buenos Aires. With the gift of the Spirit, the apostles suddenly understand, and begin their journey towards “the Lord’s great and glorious day.”
Seen and unseen, past present and future, the local and the global, all inhabit each other. Existence and process are one and the same. You cannot know the dancer from the dance, because the dancer is the dance. Under the guidance of the Spirit, the church is at once leaf, blossom, and bole: the trunk holding us up, and the flowering of all that we do in Jesus’ name. The church is as the church does, the dancer merging into the dance. The Holy Spirit both inspires those special moments in time and enfolds them into time’s eternal flow. “Rise, let us be on our way.”
As we have John’s gospel today, they do not immediately “go on their way.” Jesus talks for another 3 chapters, and they head to Gethsemane at the beginning of Chapter 18. Perhaps Chapters 15-17 are a later addition that someone thought worth preserving and inserted here.