Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 26, 2009

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.

I know that many of you are aware of this Gospel truth, that is, this truth about the Gospels, but the Gospel of John is really, really different from the other three. There are significant differences between the first three Gospels, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke; but there are also even more significant similarities. They all occupy the same theological world. In all three of them, Jesus is primarily all about proclaiming the Kingdom of God. When you spend time with them you get used to Jesus talking in a certain way and acting in a certain way. You get comfortable with those ways of Jesus talking and acting. Then, when you turn to John. You have the overwhelming sense that you have been transported to the planet Venus, so different is the theological world of John from the theological world of the other three canonical Gospels.

There are lots and lots of differences, but one of the main ones is that in John Jesus is primarily about proclaiming himself. Specifically he is about proclaiming himself not as the one who brings the Kingdom but the one who brings “eternal life.” The phrase “the Kingdom of God,” or the Kingdom of Heaven, which is the version Matthew usually uses, occurs again and again and again in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It appears only twice in John, both times in Chapter 3. The phrase “eternal life” appears occasionally in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but it appears again and again in John. In the first three Gospels, Jesus proclaims the Kingdom, in John he proclaims himself, and he proclaims eternal life.

Which means that the Gospel of John is about life after death, right? John’s use of the term eternal life, sometimes translated as “everlasting life,” has lead an awful lot of people to think so. John is the favorite Gospel of people who think that Christianity is about how you get your ticket to heaven punched so that you can go live with Jesus in the sky after you die. There are lots of passages in John that can be read that way. At John 10:28, for example, Jesus says “I will give them eternal life, and they will never perish.” The conviction that believing in Jesus will get us to heaven, a belief grounded most of all in the Gospel of John, brings great comfort to many people, and I’m not saying that it isn’t true.

I am convinced, however, that that way of reading John is a serious misreading of John. Yes, John’s Jesus talks a lot about “eternal life.” But, for the most part, he doesn’t mean by “eternal life” life unending after we die. He’s talking about life right here, right now. There’s only one place in the Gospel of John where Jesus defines “eternal life.” It’s at John 17:3. There Jesus says: “ And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” This definition, the only one John gives, tells us that “eternal life” isn’t about life in heaven after death. It’s about something that happens here and now, in this life. The eternal life that Jesus came to give his disciples—and us—is knowing God in and through Jesus Christ. It is connecting with God in and through Jesus Christ. Note that Jesus doesn’t say “and this is how you get eternal life, by knowing God and me.” He says that knowing God and him, who God has sent, is eternal life. Knowing God in and through Jesus Christ happens in this life. Eternal life happens in this world.

We see the same thing in our reading from John this morning. We heard John’s version of the famous story of Jesus walking on water. In that version of the story John says that the disciples got into a boat and started across the Sea of Galilee. John comments that “Jesus had not yet come to them.” So even though the disciples have been with Jesus a good deal up to this point in John’s Gospel, for purposes of this story they are without Jesus. That’s an important point. Keep it in mind. In this story, the disciples do not have Jesus. A storm comes up, and after a while the disciples see Jesus walking on the sea, coming near the boat. They are afraid, but Jesus reassures them that it is he, and they should not fear. Then John ends his brief version of this story with this puzzling line: “Then they wanted to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the land toward which they were going.”

There are at least two puzzling things about this line. The first one is that Jesus doesn’t get into the boat. John doesn’t say “the disciples took him into the boat.” He says “they wanted to take him into the boat”, not that they did. The second puzzling thing about John’s last line of this story is that when the disciples so much as wanted to take Jesus into their boat, “immediately the boat reached the land toward which they were going.” Was that another miracle? Did Jesus wondrously transport the boat to the shore? Well, I suppose we can read the line that way if we want, but let me suggest a different way to look at it. Let’s look at the story as metaphor, almost always a productive endeavor with Bible stories.

Recall that in the story Jesus has not yet come to the disciples. They are people who, for purposes of this story, do not know Jesus, do not have Jesus in their lives. They set out in a boat across an expanse of water headed for home. That’s a metaphor for their lives. A storm comes up. Their life is like a storm. John doesn’t really stress that the disciples are in trouble the way Mark does in his story of Jesus calming the storm, but clearly they are rowing with some difficulty. Then Jesus comes strolling past. We don’t know how he does it, but Jesus comes to them, and to us, in our times of trouble. Across our seas of trouble Jesus comes near just as he comes near to the disciples on that stormy sea in John’s story.

The disciples want to take him into the boat. That is, they make the decision that, on their sea of troubles, they want to take Jesus into their lives. They want to connect with Jesus. They want him to be part of their lives. They want him to share their troubles with them—after all, in this story Jesus doesn’t calm the sea. He doesn’t resolve the troubles. Rather, something else happens, which brings us to the second puzzling thing about John’s last line. As soon as the disciples make the decision that they want to take Jesus into the boat with them, “immediately” they reach the shore toward which they were going. Immediately they reach their goal. What does that me? It means that, for John, even the desire to connect with Jesus, which for John means to connect with God in and through Jesus, gets us to our goal. And in, John, the goal is—eternal life. Eternal life is connecting with God in and through Jesus Christ. Indeed, in this story eternal life is the mere desire to connect with God in and through Jesus Christ. Eternal life happens here and now when we make the decision to bring Jesus into our lives and to know God in and through him.

OK, but you’re probably asking: How is that eternal life if it happens here and now? Well, think of it this way. What is eternal? Only God is eternal. Eternal life, then, is life in God. And we can have life in God here and now because God came and comes to us in the person of Jesus Christ. We reach the goal of eternal life, that is, of life with God, when we make the decision to bring Jesus into our lives. Does that sound a bit too much like a conservative evangelical invitation to an altar call, a call to come forward and confess your faith in Jesus Christ? If it does, so be it. Being a Christian is indeed about connecting with God in and through Jesus Christ. Or better, as this story says, being a Christian is about wanting to connect with God in and through Jesus Christ. John’s version of the story of Jesus walking on the water says that the desire to bring Jesus into our lives is what gets us to our goal, what gets us to eternal life, to life with God. When you have that desire, immediately you reach the goal— if, that is, you understand that when you confess your desire to have Jesus in your life, Jesus will indeed come into your life and bring you eternal life with God. Here Now. Perhaps we will have eternal life after this life. That is our hope as Christians. We know that we can have eternal life, life with God, here and now. Immediately. Amen.