Sermon - Reformation Sunday (10/25/2020)
Jer. 31:31-34; Ps. 46; Rom. 3:19-28; Jn. 8:31-36
“If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”
Our gospel reading for Reformation Sunday comes from the eighth chapter of John’s gospel, which is a lot of talk book-ended by two dramatic stories of attempted stonings.[1]
The chapter begins with the famous story of the woman who was caught in adultery. Which in itself is a bit of a red flag – I’m no expert in adultery, fortunately, but my understanding is that it’s not a sin you can commit by yourself. So it’s kind of suspicious that this crowd of men is dragging only this one woman in for punishment, while her partner in crime, presumably a man like themselves, seems to have gotten away.
Whatever the justice of their motives, these men are clear about what religious duty requires: this woman must be stoned. She must be driven out of the community of the living, and everyone who calls themselves a member of the community must participate. That’s the way stoning works; everybody has to participate, and so everyone is responsible, and yet no one individual has to feel responsible. And in this way they can hide from themselves the brutality of what they are actually doing, turning on and killing one of their own. And yet Jesus refuses to participate. He does not condone adultery; he does not even expressly reject the law requiring punishment by stoning. He simply refuses to participate. Let the one without sin cast the first stone, he says.
And then, in the rest of chapter 8, after this stoning is averted, Jesus engages in a series of discussions in which Jesus progressively rips the veil off the way people have hidden behind piety and religious observances in order to avoid recognizing their complicity in injustice and exclusion and needless death. Jesus relentlessly shows how everybody he’s talking to is like the crowd that wanted to stone the woman caught in adultery – people doing something wrong and calling it a good deed, people justifying themselves and their actions by those supposedly good deeds done in the name of God’s law and yet totally blind to what’s really going on and totally missing the point of who God is and how God is working. And Jesus is so direct and uncompromising that, at the end of the chapter, the crowd picks up stones to try to stone Jesus himself.
In the section of chapter 8 that we read today, part of these discussions in between the two attempted stonings, Jesus addresses people who have just begun to follow him. If you continue in my word, Jesus says – if you don’t just listen to my word but dwell in it, let my way shape you and change you so that my word is written on your heart, as you truly become my disciples, my students, my apprentices – if you dwell in my word, you will come to know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
And these new followers of Jesus responded: What do you mean, set us free? We don’t have to be set free. We are children of Abraham, we have never been slaves to anyone. “I’m proud to be an Israelite, where at least I know I’m free.” Set us free?!
Now, since this is the season for fact-checking, I must point out that these new disciples get Three Pinocchios for saying that the children of Abraham have never been slaves. I mean, there was that whole Egypt and Pharoah thing. 430 years, that’s a long time. But if you forget about that, you also forget how the people of Israel were freed from slavery in Egypt – it wasn’t by their own efforts, but by the free gift of God’s grace. God, who saw their oppression and heard their cries for deliverance. God, who remembered God’s promises of a land and freedom to Abraham and Sarah and their descendants. God, who delivered them with signs and wonders and provided for them in the wilderness when they were ready to turn back. Instead of acknowledging these things, these new followers of Jesus say: We are already free, we have always been free, freedom is our right, we’re entitled to our freedom because we perform our religious obligations to God.
And hearing this, Jesus shakes his head, and says: You don’t even realize how entrapped you are. If you would only follow me, observe my actions, learn from my example, abide in my word, then you would discover the gracious presence of God. In how Jesus treated the woman caught in adultery we see what God is like. God who is without violence or coercion. God who is pure love for all, even for enemies and those who are unfaithful. God who suffers with all those who are excluded and cast out in the name of religious and patriotic duty. God who is free, not like powerful humans who take and grab what they please, but supremely free to love and forgive anyone and anything regardless of what they’ve done or not done to deserve it.
Follow me and you will discover this God. And you will discover what you were unable to see when you thought you had to justify yourself before God, you will know the truth, and then you’ll really be free, as God is free. Free to love as God loves, even to love enemies. Free to forgive, free to include rather than exclude, free to reconcile rather than stone, free from the fear of death.
You can see why this gospel passage is appointed for reading on Reformation Sunday. Not simply because it illustrates the teaching of Jesus that trying to justify ourselves by our religious observances actually prevents us from experiencing God’s grace, which Martin Luther believed had been largely forgotten by the Christian churches of his time and place. But also because it illustrates how hard it was, then and now, to accept the invitation of Jesus to know the truth and be set free.
T.S. Eliot once famously said, “Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.”[2] Let’s face it, nobody wants to admit that we are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves. OK, I won’t try to speak for you, I’ll speak for myself. I don’t like to admit that I do not have my act together, that sometimes I act from less than noble motives. Tell me that I’ve ignored or disappointed you and I will feel the strong urge to tell you all the good things I’ve done for you that you should appreciate. But hopefully I will instead make myself look you in the eye and say, “I’m sorry.”
Tell me that I have without realizing it treated someone of another race as somehow inferior to myself, and I will immediately feel defensive. I hope I have enough self-awareness not to claim that I’m the least racist person you’ve ever met, but I may well want to say that I didn’t mean it, that I’ve come a long way, that I’m so much better than a lot of other people – and all of that may well be true, but thinking that a person I have harmed, even unintentionally, should care about my wounded ego is itself a selfish and sinful attitude. Much better to say, “Thanks for pointing that out, I’ll try to be better.” Thanks for showing me the truth, and with a little more truth maybe I’ll be a little more free next time. But it’s really hard. And I understand why Jesus got so much pushback, so much opposition.
I think this is why Martin Luther said that, ultimately, the teaching on which the church stands or falls is whether we really believe that justification is by grace through faith, apart from works of the law. Until I trust that justification – my being made right with God – is 100 percent something that God does and has nothing to do with me – until I really believe that this is just who God is, until I believe that God isn’t interested in my piety or in my religious observances or my efforts to make the world a better place but that God is simply interested in me, then my ego is always going to get in the way of my happiness and my ability to be present to and helpful to my neighbor. If I didn’t have faith that God already loved me enough to die for me despite my failings, I could not bear the truth about my failings. But with that faith, that trust that God wants my good no matter what, I just might be able to handle a little bit of truth, and this is a truth that really sets me free.
For it is only by dwelling in the word and life of Jesus, the word of God’s absolute, unconditional love and grace for all of God’s beloved children, including me, including you – only then can we really know the truth, only then can we bear to look at the truth no matter how challenging or upsetting it might be, only then will we be truly free.
1 – For helping me to see how the two attempted stonings frame the narrative of John 8, I am indebted to Brian Zahnd, Farewell to Mars (2014), ch. 5.
2 – T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets.