Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 15, 2007

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

We all love the Bible, right? I mean, it is our book. It is the book we use in communal worship and in personal devotion. It is the only source we have for information about Jesus, the one we call Lord and Savior. It contains our foundational story. Without it, we wouldn’t be Christians. Yet for all that there are things in it that drive me nuts. I suppose that’s not surprising given the fact that the Bible is a collection of ancient writings by people who lived in very different times and very different cultures who testified in their writing to their experience and understanding of God. It’s hardly possible that their experiences of God would be the same as mine. After all, the various writers of the Bible don’t even all have the same experience of God, so I guess it shouldn’t surprise me when something they say drives me nuts. A good example is the theology of Deuteronomy. The book of Deuteronomy has some great stuff in it. It has, for example, the Shema, the creed of Judaism: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” Deut. 6:4-5 (NRSV) But the main thrust of Deuteronomic theology is that God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked in this life. That theology also appears in many of the Psalms, and it just isn’t true. Maybe that was the Deuteronomist’s experience; but it sure isn’t mine, and I doubt that it is yours. So as much as the Bible is our book, there are still things in it that we must reject.

There’s something about the Gospel of John that drives me nuts too. Well, actually, there are several things about the Gospel of John that drive me nuts, but I want to talk about just one of them this morning. A good example of it appears at the very beginning of John’s story that we all know as “Doubting Thomas.” The story begins: “When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them….” John 20:19 NRSV This verse is one of 64 in the Gospel of John (according to my concordance) where John uses the term “the Jews” to refer to the enemies of Jesus and the disciples. And every time I read it I want to shout: What do you mean “the Jews”?! All of the people in this story are Jews!” The disciples behind the locked doors were every bit as much Jews as were the people they supposedly were afraid of. You can’t distinguish between the disciples and other people by calling the other people “the Jews.” They’re all Jews. But that is precisely what the author of the Gospel of John does again and again. Why? Surely he knew that Jesus and the first disciples were all Jews. So what’s going on here?

What’s going on here is that John is telling a story that is set on the day of Jesus’ Resurrection, but he is describing a situation that prevailed some 70 or so years later, when John was writing. By that time, Judaism and Christianity had separated, or were in the painful process of separating into distinct religions. It was not an amicable separation. The Jews came to believe that anyone who believed that Jesus was the Messiah was not a true Jew. The Christians resented being separated from their mother faith. The conflict between “the Jews” and the Christians that we see in the Gospel of John reflects that later animosity between the two groups. That’s why John speaks as though Jesus and the disciples weren’t Jews and as though the Jews were their opponents.

That’s the historical situation behind John’s use of the term “the Jews.” But of course that historical situation has not prevailed for over 1,800 years. So we have to ask: Is there any lesson for us in John’s nonsensical use of the term “the Jews”? I think there is (or else I wouldn’t be preaching on it, I suppose). His use of the term “the Jews” is one way in which the author of the Gospel of John creates a separation between his Christian community and all other people. In this little story of the Christians hiding behind doors that are locked to keep “the Jews” out, we have a perfect image of how the world looks when we divide people into we and they. John has made “the Jews” the other. His locked doors symbolize a sharp distinction between groups of people. They separate us from them, the ins from the outs, the good guys from the bad guys, the saved from the lost. They symbolize a rigid boundary, and they make the other the enemy. In John’s story those people aren’t just different from us, they are people of whom we must be afraid. They are people from whom we must protect ourselves. Those locked doors signify not only a barrier, they signify a value judgment. We’re better than they are. We get it, and they don’t. We’re right, and they’re wrong. It’s us against them, folks. Whose side are you on? Those locked doors of John’s story shout all of those things, especially when we understand why John has locked the Jews out.

It is ever thus with us humans, isn’t it? We never tire of creating divisions among people, then locking ourselves in and locking them out. In the history of our country racism is one big way in which we have done it. First we white people refused even to see Black people as fully human. Our own Constitution still says that a slave is worth 3/5ths of a white man. Then, when slavery could no longer hold, we build locked doors of apartheid, both legal and de facto, to separate them from us. We still do. We also build locked doors of classism when we dehumanize the poor and blame them for our country’s social problems. We build locked doors of citizenship to separate the privileged us from the unprivileged them. Most of all we build locked doors of nation states. The powers that rule the world divide us into nations and pit nation against nation. Every nation—some more than others but still every nation—thinks of itself as a we opposed to the them of all other nations. Nations turn other nations into the enemy. We use the accident of our birth into a particular nation to make ourselves feel superior to those born into other nations, especially other nations that differ from us in race, religion, and wealth. Sometimes in our country those locked doors are not just a metaphor. We build gated communities for the wealthy and lock the gates to create an illusion of safety for the haves against the have-nots. We Christians try to lock God’s grace behind closed doors, claiming that that grace is available only to us and not to anyone else. Those first Christian disciples on that first Easter day were not the only ones to hide behind locked doors for fear of the other. We do it all the time.

John’s story of “Doubting Thomas” begins with locked doors, with the good guys on one side and the bad guys, the ones we have to be afraid of, on the other. That’s how the story begins, but it is not how it ends. In John’s story, on two separate occasions a week apart, the risen Christ passes through the locked doors. John says twice that despite the locked doors “Jesus came and stood among them.” John 20:19, 26 NRSV Locked doors are not locked doors to Jesus. The disciples have shut themselves off, but Jesus will not be shut out. The disciples created a barrier between themselves and the others, the ones they called the enemy; but Jesus knows no barriers. The disciples saw the world as we and they, as us against them; but Jesus goes where he will, acknowledging no divisions between people. If John’s locked doors symbolize the way in which we humans create divisions between people, Jesus appearing through those locked doors symbolizes God’s rejection of those divisions.

We can choose how we see the world. We can buy into the human propensity for creating divisions. We can see the world as a dangerous place. We can see other people, people who are different from us, people of a different color or a different religion, as threats. We can seek to hide behind our national borders and our military might the way Jesus’ disciples in John’s story hid behind locked doors “for fear of the Jews.” Or we can see the world the way Jesus does. We can see all those divisions for what they truly are, artificial human constructs grounded in fear and in a desperate need to feel superior. We can hide behind our locked doors; or we can, with Jesus, pass through those doors into the unity of God’s people and God’s world. Of course there are dangers. Of course there are threats. I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t. But all the divisions we humans create among ourselves are not the solution to those threats, they are their cause.

We can continue to see the world as we and they, or we can try to see our existential unity behind all the divisions. John made a sharp distinction between Christian and Jew. Father James Eblan of Seattle University sees beyond that distinction to our essential unity, saying: “Christianity is one way of being Jewish, but it isn’t the only way.” Can we find the courage so say being American is one way of being human, but it isn’t the only way? Can we find the courage to walk with Jesus through all our locked doors into the essential unity of all of God’s people? I pray that we can, for it may be the only thing that will save us from ourselves. Amen.