Stewart Weaver

I’ve been doing some reading in two books.  One is John Ashton’s ‘Understanding the Fourth Gospel’.  The other is Roger Scruton’s ‘Culture Counts’.  These two, plus the art celebration give pause to think. What’s the outline for Sunday?  Something like this.  The reading is John 5.1-18.  The lame man is healed but for some reason he seems a bit undecided about this Jesus character.  Because of the healing on a Sabbath a confrontation ensues between Jesus and the Pharisees.  Out of nowhere Jesus mentions that he working as his Father is working.  The Pharisees react with shock and horror and decide all the more to kill him.  It’s actually the first real reference to the divinity of Jesus so important in the Gospel of John.  What’s the fuss?According to Ashton, only God can judge and give life (in Jewish thinking).  Moreover, God takes a break from all things apart from judgement on the Sabbath.  I think Ashton is saying this: Jesus is both judging the Pharisees and giving life on the Sabbath.  He works on the Sabbath like God and is therefore to be condemned for insisting on the parallel between his work and God’s.  It’s too much for the religious leaders.

John presents his stories in many levels: artistic, theological, symbolic, metaphorical, etc.  Many of the traditional scholars too look for the history of the text: when did particular sections become part of the proposed ‘original’ text?  Which ideas are from their Jewish mileux (sp?), which might be Gnostic and which transformed by the early Christian community.  However one might read the book it is exquisitely crafted.  It is a work of art.

And, according to Scruton, art and culture in many respects have overtaken religion in their attempts to confer on us thoughts on the way to think.  They teach us how to feel.  As one thinker mentioned, museums are contemporary sanctuaries.  That is where we get spiritual sustenance.  Anyone who comes into St. P’s this weekend will see human spirit and endeavour at its best.  Lovely works of art and challenging works of art.  But in what sense do they teach us how to feel?  How to act?  Where is the imperative?

And thus, back to John.  He preseents to us a cast of characters who react to him in different ways: Nicodemus, Samaritan woman, John the Baptist, etc.  How do they feel?  How do they react?  What are we to learn from them?  And, most intriguingly, if we are to imitate Christ, how does he act?  In the entirety of John there is an aloofness to him, almost as if he is somewhat removed.  The messenger from heaven travelling in this foreign land.  I wouldn’t want to be detached like that.  And yet perhaps there is an equinimaty about John’s picture of Christ because he is most attached to God.  In that faith there is equinimaty.  Perhaps that is the reaction we shouldpursue most of all.

A few thoughts.  How will they change by Sunday?  Who knows?  What do you think?