Easter 4C: Information vs Formation: Being Kept in Suspense as the Engine of Faith

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

Fourth Sunday After Easter, Year C

The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector

Today’s Gospel highlights the nature of what it means to follow Jesus and the difference between having information about Jesus and being formed into his likeness, the crucial but oft overlooked difference between information and formation, between feeding our heads and opening our hearts. The people around Jesus, gathered for a joyous festival of light we know today as Hanukah are fed up. They want a straight answer for once. Are you the Messiah or not? “How long will you keep us in suspense?” What a question! The interesting thing, which I’ll tease out as we go along is that being kept in suspense without what John Keats calls, “irritable reaching after fact and reason,” is what keeps us faithful. “The opposite of faith, says Paul Tillich, “is not doubt, but certainty.”

Like the people around Jesus, we want to have things figured out, pinned down, neat-and tidy. But Jesus is saying that that isn’t really how faith works. “I have told you and you do not believe,” Jesus says. You’ve read my resume. You know my date of birth, hair color, height, weight, and how fast I can run the forty-yard dash. You’ve got all the information, but you still don’t know who I am. You know things about me, but you aren’t in relationship with me. You have all the information, but you’ve yet to be transformed through direct, personal encounter. You’ve read the menu, but haven’t tasted the meal.

One of our inheritances from the Enlightenment and Descartes’ fateful pronouncement, “I think therefore I am” is that faith as relationship to the Living Christ has often been replaced by information about Jesus. Awe, wonder, poetry, beauty, unknowing and mystery—the willing surrender of control and certainty—are seen as relics of a bygone era. The trouble, of course, is that this simply isn’t how the gospels are written or indicative of the kind of life they induct us into. We get poetry and parables instead of an instruction manual. We get relationship with the one who is always moving in and out of our midst instead of rules to follow. The Risen Christ is an uncontainable otherness and irreducibly strange. He walks into the locked room of our fearful certainty and breathes peace when we are expecting vengeance. He can’t be possessed or turned into an object for our intellect to grasp once-and-for-all.

Christ tells Mary in garden “Do not hold on to me.” On the Road to Emmaus, no sooner do the disciples recognize that the fellow they’ve been telling all about Jesus actually is Jesus, than Jesus disappears and vanishes from their sight. In the shorter, authentic ending of Mark we have the women fleeing from the empty tomb—he is not here, he has gone ahead of you into Galilee says the young man. “The poem,” writes Wallace Stevens, “must resist the intellect almost successfully.” And that’s what the Risen Christ, the Living Jesus does well—resists our attempts to fashion him in our own image and turn him into a plaything of our personal preferences and proclivities.

Time and again, Jesus keeps slipping through our fingers, disappearing around the next bend. He always eludes our grasp. Now on one level, this is quite annoying. We like being in control and knowing what’s going on. And we can sympathize with folks around Jesus who want a straight answer for once. Why would God choose to reveal himself in his only son, only to have him so difficult to grasp, so elusive, so hard to pin down?

I think the answer to Jesus’ elusiveness is that it actually inducts us into the process of faith, into the process of discipleship and transformation. It’s as if having all the answers, having it all pinned down, is actually in some strange way counter-productive to the kind of transformative encounter Jesus is trying to bring about in the disciples and the myriad of people with whom he meets. Gathering information, possessing all sorts of knowledge about a person is different than being in relationship with someone.

At every wedding I do, at some point in the homily I say to the couple something like, “You know, over eighteen years of marriage I’ve discovered something. I love my wife best when I don’t know who she is.” Usually they have a rather horrified expression on their faces. Why did you just make us go through all that marriage counseling that’s designed to help us get to each other better then? My point is not that we shouldn’t spend time getting clear on how we handle things like money, sex, and conflict, and whether there are different expectations around having kids. That’s all important work.

My point is rather that for a relationship to blossom, flourish, and grow, there needs to be an element of curiosity, discovery, mystery. When we know who the other person is, when we have them all figured out, when we have them pegged, it’s all too easy for us to dismiss them. We trade the irreducible particularity of their radical uniqueness for our easy and comfortable idea of who that person is. The mysterious being of the other, called into being and sustained in each moment by God’s grace, is reduced to something we already know. The person fades away. Their otherness, their strangeness, their unrepeatable mystery is replaced with who we think that person is. Instead of relating subject to subject, we relate subject to object. And in case you haven’t noticed it’s hard to have a relationship with an object—even if it’s a ‘57 Mustang.

Not-knowing, being “kept in suspense” in the words of today’s gospel is actually the engine that keeps us faithful. It’s what keeps us alert and attentive to the calling beckoning voice of God, the voice of the Good Shepherd whose deepest desire is to love us into loving. God is not an idea, a set of rules, or a collection of techniques. God is a living reality that always exceeds our grasp and who calls us beyond what we think we know into living relationship. God’s not a spreadsheet of information, but someone who asks that we no longer listen to the voices in our heads, those well-patterned tape-loops, but to the new song God is singing in Christ.

That’s why the gospels are filled with all those injunctions to become like children. To become little. To become poor. It’s when we realize the dead end of our self-sufficiency, our reliance and dependence upon a reality greater than ourselves, that the freedom for which we are literally made, life with the Living Christ at its foundation, starts to manifest in our lives. Being in suspense is God’s way of keeping us open and listening, keeping us humble, keeping us from thinking that the way things are is the only way they might be.

So faith is not really about acquiring information so much as it is in being in relationship and deepening that relationship. The Roman Catholic New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson is fond of reminding folks that the problem with the search for the historical Jesus is that it is like trying to do an autopsy on a living person. Information about Jesus isn’t going save us, isn’t going to transform our lives, isn’t going to open us up to be vehicles for the transformative power of God to make this world a little more like God’s dream for it and little less like the nightmare of our own devising it so often is. Only relationship can do that.

Remember in John when Jesus calls the first disciples, they ask him where is he staying. And Jesus doesn’t give an answer, but replies with the tantalizing phrase, “Come and see.” Imagine if Jesus had given them a business card with the address and office hours! They would have tucked it into their wallet and probably forgotten about it. Instead, Jesus invites them into relationship. Jesus invites them to abide with him, to spend time opening to the transformative power of his presence. And they do. They spend the entire day with Jesus, and their lives are irrevocably changed. Fisherfolk get turned into heroes and martyrs. Their relationship with each other, their understanding of God, their culture, their values are all completely overturned.

If we are to live into our calling as Easter people who live from the Risen Life of Christ, we need to spend time in Jesus’ loving presence daily. We need to be in relation that we might experience God’s transformation. Of course, we do this through daily prayer, through reading the gospels, through weekly worship in community, through serving others in the spirit of sacrificial love. The life of discipleship is about making a little space for God to get at us, of making a little room for the startling realization that we are always already held in the Father’s hand and that nothing can snatch us away from God’s unconditional love for us. Information will only take us so far. Relationship—knowing ourselves as branches on the vine, knowing ourselves as friends, not servants—is what transforms us and opens the door for God’s transformative power to work through us.

Jesus’ call to the disciples to come and see, to take and eat, is his call to us right here and right now. May we be a people not content with reading the menu, who mistake the map for the territory. May we be a people who make opening to the presence, relationship and encounter with the Living God the center of our lives. May we be a people who know that in not knowing, in being kept in suspense, we edge closer to living from Jesus’ intimacy with the father, the one he called Abba, papa, daddy.