One of my middle school science teachers had an exercise to open each class. It was called “Believe It or Not.” Each day, we would begin class with the teacher showing us a fascinating claim on the transparency machine (do you remember those?). We would then have to guess whether the statement was true or not.
Believe it or not: you have to close your eyes when you sneeze to protect them. Believe it or not: if we took the DNA from the number of cells in a human body and laid it out linearly, it would wrap around the earth 2.5 million times. Believe it or not: the lifespan of a turtle can be as much as several hundred years. For the record, I’m not going to tell you which of those statements are true!
The fun of this game was that it was nearly impossible to guess whether something was true or false. The claims were so astounding that when they were true, they were nearly impossible to believe.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus makes four astounding claims. The fact that we might fail to recognize them as nearly preposterous may be telling in and of itself. Perhaps we have we lost, over time, an ability to readily believe Jesus words. We are too skeptical of the claim that God can still work wonders among us. But in his Farewell Discourse to the disciples on the eve of his death, Jesus says four incredible things.
Here’s the first. Believe it or not: God wants us to have joy in our lives. On the surface, this does not seem so hard to believe. But how many people do you know who actually believe this? On the one hand, there are those who think the joy God desires for us is to be equated with perpetual happiness. Or joy means that God always wants us to have the most fashionable car or gobs of wealth.
But how many people truly believe that God desires for us to have real joy? Do you believe that God allows—indeed wants—you to have joy in your life? Can you believe this without imagining any strings are attached? How easily we forget that even in the marriage service of our prayer book, it is clearly stated that marriage is for the mutual joy of two people. Even people of faith have come to believe that if anything is enjoyed, there must be punishment waiting around the corner. Experiencing joy is almost too good to be true. And it is difficult to accept that things can be enjoyed as things in themselves, rather than merely utilized for some other end.
The second incredible thing that Jesus tells his disciples in his Farewell Discourse is that he considers them to be his friends. We are to extend that to ourselves. Believe it or not: Jesus considers us his friends. Again, does that seem ridiculous to us? And if not, perhaps it is because Facebook has trained us to cheapen the meaning of friendship. But this is no ordinary friendship of which Jesus speaks. It is a relationship of mutual love, of self-sacrificial love. It is a friendship that gives us the right to approach Jesus not from the perspective of a servant but nearly as an equal. It means that Jesus doesn’t hide from us the astounding things the Father has shared with him. It means that Jesus draws us, his friends, into the life shared between him and the Father through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Can we even begin to imagine this type of friendship, something that goes far, far deeper than the click of a button on social media? This is not the kind of friendship that suddenly blossoms when we need a favor. If we understand the depth of this kind of friendship, it may be difficult to fathom that we are worthy to be called a friend of Jesus, especially since he is our Lord and Savior.
You will see that all these astonishing claims follow from one another and are related. So, the third amazing thing that Jesus tells us is that, believe it or not, because we have been chosen by the Father, we are capable of bearing tremendous fruit. Like the other claims, this may not resonate deeply with us. But recall the kind of fruit of which Jesus speaks. This is no meager batch of mealy apples that we are to produce. We are to generate fruit so rich and abundant that the world will never be the same after this fruit is created.
In the previous chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus describes what this fruit looks like. It is the fruit of marvelous works, not just good works, but works that create a seismic shift in the state of the world, for the good of the world. Believe it or not, Jesus says that the works we will do will be greater even than those he has done in his lifetime. This is not because of any superhuman power on our part, but it is because Jesus will ascend to the Father and unleash the Holy Spirit among us to work wonders. Can you really believe this?
Which brings us to the final unbelievable claim that Jesus makes. It is a claim that bears both a temptation and a promise. Believe it or not: if we abide in love of God and one another, and if we ask the Father for anything, anything, in the Name of Jesus, the Father will give it to us. It is such an astonishing proposition because we know how it might be abused. But the caveat is that it must be rooted in love. And if we are abiding in that love, we can’t help but ask for the right things.
Do you see, now, how incredible these claims are? Do you believe them? It’s not difficult to understand why the power latent in these words has been deflated over the years. These promises are almost too good to be true. Human greed and manipulation, yes even in the Church herself, have twisted pure joy into obligation and punitive enforcement of duty. Shame has replaced joy. The sins of pride and selfishness have prevented us from retaining a robust understanding of friendship. Self-preservation has all but ensured that a deep, sacrificial love between friends is a rare thing indeed. The idol of perfectionism and obsession with self-image has convinced us that we are not capable of bearing long-lasting fruit to benefit the world. Or if we do, we bear fruit of our own accord, not with God’s help, but because we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and take charge of our own lives. And as far as asking the Father for anything, well, this has been so misused, that it is no wonder many fail to believe it. The tenth time we ask for the winning lottery ticket or the new Mercedes without any result, any belief in this claim dies.
But these claims are not astonishing because we can’t believe them. They are not astonishing because they are not really true. They are incredible because they are true and because of what they say about God and about us, too. Jesus’ four staggering assertions reveal a God who is not an eternal sadist but One who loves us so much, and even trusts us so much, to send his Holy Spirit to enable us to do works so great that we cannot even imagine them.
These four amazing promises reveal that God has in mind a future for this world that is not catastrophic but inherently promising and good. It is an optimistic vision that flies in the face of much of what we read and hear in the news, but it is revealed in Jesus’ words to his disciples and to us.
These four nearly preposterous declarations by the Son are proof that God does not desire us to grovel before him or barter our way to happiness, but that God loves us unconditionally and longs for us to be in relationship with him. It is only we who have trouble seeing this.
And if we still cannot believe these stupefying claims, it is because we have not yet realized how confounding it is that our God would stoop so low as to send his only Son to die and prove to us that we are not mere servants, but we are his friends. It is only because of this profound truth that we have any right to believe the four unbelievable things that Jesus has told us.
It may be that we have become so complacent and lazy in our appreciation of God’s words to us because we have neglected to run with the baton that God has handed us. We have forgotten that God has already chosen us, and we are standing at the beginning of the race, waiting for it to begin. And by now, we should long have been running into the wind.
But God has not stopped waiting for us to respond. He has chosen us. He has sent his Son to call us friends. He has shared the love and joy of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with us. He has told us, through Jesus, that believe it or not, we will bear unbelievable fruit for the sake of the world with his help. It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when. God doesn’t hope that we will ask him for things. God expects that we will. God is just patiently waiting, waiting for us to stop and remember all that he has done for us. God is longing for us to understand how much he has given us and how much we can do in his Name, if we can only believe that it is all true.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sixth Sunday of Easter
May 9, 2021