“But these things have I told you, that when the time shall come, ye may remember that I told you of them.”
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Growing up, every so often in Sunday School I would hear the stories of the faithful martyrs and confessors. Fr. Glenn described these confessors a few weeks back: “men and women [who] bore in their bodies of flesh the wounds of persecution — they were blinded, their tongues cut out, hands and feet cut off, ears and noses severed. They took it that Jesus’ flesh had become the place of judgement, and now they rejoiced that they had the honor of imitating Jesus in their bodies.”
They rejoiced! How odd! As a child, I would sometimes wonder whether I would have the depth of faith to endure persecution, much less rejoice. To be honest, my general attitude was pretty close to a line from a character in a Flannery O’Connor short story: “I can’t be a saint, but I might be a martyr if they kill me quick.” Believe it or not, today’s readings teach us how to prepare for martyrdom — though the operative question for us is not so much “Can I endure persecution?” but rather “Will I die to self today — and will I do it joyfully?”
This is the fourth in a series of five Sundays in a row in which the Gospel text is taken from the Farewell Discourse in St. John’s Gospel. During this time, Fr. Glenn has been leading us deeper into the concepts of deification, participation, imitation, and desire, and so I want to bring these concepts to bear on today’s readings — both of which are concerned with life in Christ in this present evil age. The texts exhort us to desire the things of Christ and imitate his life. We can only do that because of the prior fact of our having been grafted into the divine life — such that, in the Words of the Collect, “like as we do believe thy only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell.”
Just as we cannot ascend into the heavens through our own striving, so too it is not personal grit or toughness that enables us to meet suffering with joy. Rather, it is Christ’s own faithfulness to us, mediated by the Holy Ghost through the apostolic Church in Scripture and in sacrament. This does not, however, mean that we are passive. By grace, we do participate in the life of God, and we are empowered to imitate Jesus Christ in our own lives. We can daily decide to live as Christ, to die to self, and to desire the things of Christ. In fact, if we follow the logic of our Gospel text closely, we find that every time we trust the words of Jesus rather than the false promises of the world, the flesh, and the devil, we grow more fully into faithful witnesses — which is to say, martyrs.
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Interestingly, St. John’s Gospel does not actually describe the event of the Ascension, but our Lord refers to its reality on a number of occasions, as Fr. Glenn has highlighted in the past two Gospel texts:
“Now I go my way to him that sent me…”
“I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.”
The Ascension confirms that God has forever united human flesh to his own divine life. Jesus Christ, body and all, is somehow seated at the right hand of the Father. Our eternal destiny is that, grafted as we are into Jesus Christ through baptism, we will one day behold the glory of God face-to-face. The fullness of this beatific vision is eschatological — it will happen at the end of all things — but even now we participate in that divine life because, in Christ, the eschaton breaks into the present. As St. Peter tells us in today’s epistle,
“The end of all things is at hand.”
St. Peter’s overriding concern in our epistle text is that we take on the life of Christ — that we imitate Jesus in a life of sobriety, prayer, and fervent charity lived out in a community of mutual hospitality and ministry, which is the Church. And we do so in anticipation of the inevitable trials and tribulations of Christian living. The verses immediately following our epistle read,
“Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you: But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy.”
Our choice, of course, is not apostasy or persecution. Rather, we choose each day whether to live for ourselves in practical apostasy or die to self and live for Christ. Our choices reveal whether we trust Jesus — whether we believe that what he has for us is better than what we might choose for ourselves. Do you believe that? Do you believe that partaking of Christ’s sufferings would be better than all the pleasures of this world apart from Christ? And not just better for you — like broccoli is better than ice cream — but actually preferable, and somehow surpassingly joyful?
This concern for faithfulness amidst persecution is also shot through the Farewell Discourse in John. The Discourse occurs, as we have learned, in the context of the Last Supper. Judas has departed into the dark on his mission to betray our Lord to the rulers of this present evil age, and so Jesus has mere hours to impart his final, urgent teachings before his arrest in Gethsemane.
He largely reiterates what he has been telling the disciples all along but with greater urgency — because they have absolutely no idea what is coming. The principalities and powers are coming to seize our Lord and scatter his followers. They will break his physical body, and the members of his mystical body will be driven into hiding. Jesus looks beyond these horrifying terrors of Good Friday into a Christian future characterized by persecution:
“They shall put you out of the synagogues; yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service.”
“These things I have spoken unto you,” Jesus says, “that ye should not be offended.”
In 2019, this word “offended” sounds a little odd, as if Jesus is worried they’ll find it a bit rude to be fed to lions. The verb is scandalizo — from which we get scandalize, but the sense here is of being brought to a stop by an obstacle (Whitacre 387). Specifically, Jesus does not want them to fall away from the faith when they meet persecution.
Earlier in St. John’s Gospel — in what’s known as the Bread of Life Discourse — Jesus uses the same verb, scandalizo. After declaring that they must feed on his flesh and drink his blood to have eternal life, Jesus asks his disciples, “Doth this offend you?” The answer was yes. St John tells us that “From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him.” As these superficial disciples depart, Jesus turns to the Twelve and asks, “Will ye also go away?” St. Peter answers, “Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believe and are sure that thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Jesus’ true followers are not offended — that is, they do not fall away — precisely because they trust the words of Jesus. St. Peter believes without understanding — unlike us, he had no Eucharistic theology to make sense out of Jesus’ provocative demands. In a world beset by the curse of sin and death, we will inevitably face incomprehensible suffering. Like St. Peter, at times we must trust Jesus without understanding our situation. In St. Peter’s case, that trust turns out to be preparation for enduring persecution.
“These things I have spoken unto you that ye should not be offended.”
The natural posture of this world toward the Church is hostility. As Jesus says but a few verses before our text,
“If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.”
As American Christians, we might sometimes be tempted to think of political favor or power as our birthright. Jesus’ admonition about the love of the world ought instead to give us a holy fear of such temporal favor, lest we come to believe that we need not choose between this evil age and the age to come, that we can pay homage to Jesus and to the principalities and powers, that we can, after all, serve both God and mammon.
You and I are not likely to encounter true persecution, though our brothers and sisters, who our members of the same Body, do. My childhood speculations about enduring martyrdom were nothing more than daydreams. Nevertheless, we should ask ourselves whether we pursue Jesus with the same single-minded trust as the martyrs and confessors. Whether we like it or not, our daily lives answer that question. Either we trust that the way of the cross is indeed the way of life and peace, or we do not. Either we believe that the things of Christ are greater than the things of this world, or we do not.
We choose, every day, whom we will serve.
“But these things have I told you, that when the time shall come, ye may remember that I told you of them.”
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