St. Gregory’s Church Woodstock
Sunday, 28 December, 2008, First Sunday after Christmas
The Rev’d Susan Auchincloss
If I asked you how the Gospel of Mark begins, or the Gospel of Matthew or Luke, I doubt many of you would know. But if I asked about John’s Gospel, you probably would know. The Gospel’s first words are these: “In the beginning....” Why did John choose those particular words? Because that is how the Hebrew Bible begins in the book of Genesis: “In the beginning....” John is saying in effect, here is a new Bible; this Bible is going to set the record straight as to how it all began. Genesis went on this way: “In the beginning God created the heavens and earth....” John said: not so fast! “In the beginning was the Word....” In other words, John wanted to make it clear that before any creating could be done there had to be – what he called – the Logos, meaning the Word, or the organizing principle. He goes on to personify the Word and equate it with life, with light, and with Jesus Christ. That is an astonishing claim to make about Jesus. And the question that arises out of this amazing assertion is this: where did John get the authority to make it? To put it another way: who sez?
John’s is the last of the four Gospels. Scholars differ, but it is safe to say it was written either in the last decade of the first century or the first decade of the second. Tradition identifies the author as John, one of Jesus’ disciples; but given the dates, the author could not have known Jesus personally. Very likely the author of this Gospel wrote from within the circle of the Apostle John. In any case, it is like none of the other Gospels. John’s Gospel is all on its own in taking such a cosmic view of Jesus. And again I ask, where was he coming from? How could a person who had not known Jesus in person make these claims about him?
A possible answer comes from a Russian Orthodox monk, Anthony Bloom. The Bloom family became refugees from Russia when Anthony was a small child, after the Bolshevik Revolution, and Anthony grew up in France. Until his middle teens he was an unbeliever and aggressively anti-church. As he put it, “I knew no God, I wasn’t interested and hated everything that connected with the idea of God.” One exception occurred when he was eleven years old and attended a summer camp for boys. He met a young priest there who puzzled him. Never in his life experience had he met anyone who loved him for no reason; who, in fact, loved all the boys, whether they were good or bad. This priest made a deep impression on Anthony, which he later called his first spiritual experience; yet at the time he shrugged it off as a mystery.
His next experience came in his late teens during Lent. He belonged to a Russian Youth Organization in Paris, and the leader had invited a priest to come and talk to the boys. Anthony angrily rejected the idea and said he would not be present. His leader wisely did not insist; he just suggested that if the boys stayed away it would disgrace the youth organization. He asked that Anthony be present. He did not have to listen or pay any attention. So Anthony stayed, but he could not help listening, because what he heard was outrageous. Deeply offended, he went home after the lecture and asked his mother for a Bible. He wanted to be sure that what the priest had said was as monstrous as he thought it was.
He didn’t want to waste his time, so he checked first to see which was the shortest of the Gospels. Then he started out to read the Gospel of Mark. He got no further than the third chapter when he suddenly became aware of a presence on the other side of his desk. He was so completely certain that it was Christ standing there that the conviction never left him. He put it this way, “History I had to believe, the Resurrection I knew for a fact.” Faith never came to Anthony as a set of doctrines, or as a narrative of the life of Jesus which one could either believe or disbelieve. Instead, he had a direct, personal experience; belief or disbelief never entered into it. He lived to be 89 years old, and he never doubted what he had experienced.
He was, however, full of doubt. By this he meant that he was full of questions. In the course of his life he went on to become a medical doctor, to fight in the French Resistance, to move to England and eventually to become the head of the Russian Orthodox Church there. He came to be revered by people of all faiths, and we could say it was because of his doubts. He wrestled with his doubts throughout his life; and they led him deeper and deeper into spiritual understanding. He learned to express what he discovered in simple, clear terms, which have made his books immensely strong and also popular. What I have told you today comes from his book, Beginning to Pray.
I hope you will seek out his books. They helped me to understand how John could make such claims in his Gospel about Jesus Christ. Like Metropolitan Anthony he had experienced Christ personally. To say ‘personally’ means much more than to say that you and I know each other personally. Later in his Gospel John explains ‘personally’ when he quotes this prayer of Jesus: “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.” In other words, John was not speculating; he was not repeating something he had heard; he was writing from within that place of being one with Christ. And he wrote from a lifetime of wrestling with and learning from his doubts.
Friends, we need not be afraid of not knowing the answers and of having doubts. Faith lives and grows through questioning – through doubting and struggling to see beyond the doubts. In fact, doubting and praying go hand in hand: doubt leads to prayer and prayer leads to doubt in an ever expanding, upward spiral. This is what makes our faith community such a treasure. By sharing our doubts we learn from each other, strengthen each other, and belong to each other. We may not reach the point of making cosmic statements about Jesus Christ, but we can say with conviction, “In the beginning, I discovered, I was in Christ and Christ was in me.” Amen.