Readings – Revelation 7: 9–17; John 10: 22–30
“…you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep…”
I wonder if I say the name William Stringfellow, does that mean anything to any of you? I don’t mean the man with the dodgy nightclub, but the American Anglican theologian of the 1960s to ‘80s. Stringfellow refused ordination despite having a doctorate in theology, preferring to live in a slum tenement in Harlem while working as a lawyer offering his services for free to the poor of New York.
Fancy a little light reading? (It is a surprisingly easy read…)
A garrulous, bibulous, chain-smoker, who had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Scripture and theology, Stringfellow was heavily involved in activism against the Vietnam War. He was known in particular for allowing the famous Jesuit war resister Daniel Berrigan to hide in his house. This saw him visited by an FBI agent, who made the mistake of asking Stringfellow about the Bible. Questioning the legitimacy of Christian civil disobedience, he asked, “Doesn’t the Bible say you must obey the emperor?”
Stringfellow reports his own reply as follows:
I could not concede the simplistic premise about the Bible which his question assumed, and I rebuked him about this, taking perhaps forty-five minutes to do so. During the discourse, he wilted visibly, and, when I paused momentarily, he abruptly excused himself and departed. This was some disappointment to me, for I had only just begun to respond to the multifarious implications of the issue he had raised.
I introduce you to Stringfellow because not only did he always refuse to allow Scripture to be used to simplistically reinforce our pre-existing notions, but he had a particular demand that we read Scripture in tension. When confronted by passages of Scripture that seem to contradict or clash with one another, he argued that we should not seek to impose a false consistency on them, for we would inevitably do so in ways that simply suited our own ends. He argued instead for seeking to hear what God is saying to us in the dissonance between passages of Scripture – he argued that Scriptural Truth is often complex and can only be unveiled by being prepared to remain with the texts in tension.
Indeed, I would argue that spiritual growth often comes from allowing ourselves to sit in the tension, allowing the weaknesses and fallacies in our thinking and our attitudes to be stretched out; to allow our spiritual muscle to be built up.
This morning we have two passages of Scripture which are to some extent in tension. A Gospel that sets firm boundaries about who are God’s people; and an Epistle reading that presents a vision of heaven that is packed with people of every possible kind.
Indeed, our Gospel is challenging for a number of reasons, at least to those of us in an inclusive sort of church like St George’s. It says “So the Jews gathered around him” and we already feel ourselves uncomfortable at the starkness of the description of Jesus’ opponents as “the Jews”. Most of us have encountered people who talk about “the Jews” as their enemies, and they’re always the sort of people we make strenuous efforts to avoid sitting next to on the bus.
Then it goes on “you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish.”
I bet you’ve never heard this passage read with that particular stress and intonation before. It highlights the dangers of us making a tribal and sectarian idol out of Jesus, turning him into someone who says ‘I save my own, and you lot — you Jews — are not mine.’ We live in Northern Ireland, a place of ‘us’ and ‘them’, and a place where many Christians have long regarded themselves as the arbiters of who is really one of Jesus Christ’s flock; in particular, many have been certain that no true follower of Jesus could ever come from outside their tribe. I have no doubt that everybody in this church this morning has been told that they weren’t a real Christian at some time or other.
So, this is an unsettling passage in several regards. Here we have, in the heart of the ethereal, spiritual, otherworldly, Gospel of St John, language that can easily be repurposed for the ugly business of exclusion and othering. For all its mystical symbolism and transcendent philosophy, there’s a hard edge to John’s Gospel, often drawing a firm boundary between the community of the faithful and a wicked outside world.
But – and here’s the rub – we do all need boundaries. Try living your life without any personal or emotional boundaries and you’ll soon find yourself in a mess. One of the things that is driving the Western liberal democratic order to distraction at the moment is the tension between its promise of individual autonomy and the human need for boundaries. But that is another subject for another day.
So, to our Epistle reading. Now, the conventional wisdom is that while the Gospel of St John is spiritual and otherworldly, the Revelation is frankly bonkers, fit only for end of the world televangelists and people on drugs.
Now, maybe I’m a bit odd, but I’ve always found the Revelation a delight, perhaps because I think that any honest description of a genuinely God-given vision of the heavenly realms and the end of the world must involve things that seem crazy by everyday standards: mundane language must always fail to describe the truly transcendent.
More than that, while the Revelation contains pretty terrifying descriptions of some of what must come to pass in this world, it ends with the restoration of all creation by God despite humanity’s best efforts to destroy it – and what more hopeful message could we hear in this era of environmental destruction? It also presents the magnificently all-embracing vision of Heaven we heard this morning, with the great multitude that no one could count from, and let me again emphasise certain words here, every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages.
We might argue whether heaven in this vision embraces all people – that again is a topic for another time – but it certainly embraces all peoples: including those who never heard the Gospel, including those that are entirely Muslim, or entirely Hindu, or who lived long before Christ.
It includes all our various tribes here in Northern Ireland, including the two big ones – and isn’t that a hopeful message in Assembly election week?
So, what do we discover when we hold these two texts in tension? What emerges when we allow the sharp boundaries of John’s Gospel to encompass the vision of heaven full of people of every tribe?
Well, firstly, when we ask who Jesus means when he talks about “my sheep” in John, the answer is provided by Revelation: Christ has sheep of every flock. It is Jesus Christ’s to establish the boundaries of His Kingdom, not yours or mine.
That implies a second truth – we are duty-bound to love and forgive our neighbours, although it isn’t always easy, because we never know which of them we’ll be waving a palm frond next to in Heaven, and if we want to get there, we’ll have to be forgiven quite a bit ourselves.
Thirdly, and lastly, look towards the eternal rather than the temporal. The Church became rather consumed in recent generations with trying to provide political solutions to the world’s problems – but the world will always have problems. That isn’t an argument from disengaging from the world, or from disengaging from politics – I am the last person who would say that.
What I do say is that a faith that is fixed firmly on the eternal, far from distracting us from the problems of the world, gives us perspective on them, nourishes us when we become exhausted by them, and ultimately inspires us to seek to help God’s Kingdom come on Earth as it is in Heaven.
And now to God be the glory, the Father the creator of all life, the Son the restorer to new life, the Spirit who breathes in all life, now and forever, as is most justly his due. Amen.
