Fifth Sunday of Easter 1977

God is greater than our hearts

Most of the readings of the six Sundays after Easter are taken from the so-called Johannine writings, either from the Gospel of John or the Letters, and especially from the First Letter. We don’t know who wrote that material. Most likely many people wrote it..., and they lived in a community that had its own very distinctive flavour. All you have to do is read a little bit of the Gospel of John and then compare it with a comparable passage in any of the other Gospels and you will see that something different is going on, and that in John there is a wholly different sensibility. One of the things that I think is characteristic of the Johannine readings, and it has been pointed out by all kinds of people for centuries, is that there is a meditative quality in these that you don’t find in any of the other Gospels. I bring that up, first of all because it needs saying, but also because it points out one of the exigencies of these texts: they take time... They simply take time, and they do not yield themselves to some kind of cursory reading and therefore if we are to deal with this stuff seriously then we have to give it time, which is very difficult for us to do. So what I’d like to do this morning is just suggest a dimension of this text, especially from the First Letter of John, which acts as an invitation to give time and space to these texts.

There is an astonishing sentence here when the author says, "Whenever our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts." It is very important to know that the Jews, just like most people in the Third World today, were mercifully free of what we call the Romantic tradition. No Sturm und Drang here, no great upwelling and tumult of emotions... When they say "heart," they are talking in the coldest and most realistic terms about what constitutes a person, their mind, their affections, and their desires. For the Jews, none of those were separable, unlike for us who are the heirs, unfortunately, of the tradition that goes from Plato to Descartes and all kinds of others who want to split up the head and the heart. You know Pascal’s great statement about the heart having reasons that the head doesn’t even know about. The Jews wouldn’t be able to make anything out of that at all. No, when John says, "if our heart condemns us," he is talking about something that emerges from the most profound sort of self-consciousness.

What does it mean to say, "our heart condemns us?" There is a vast range of possibilities. Who in their deepest sense of themselves does not experience herself or himself as having failed, intentionally or unintentionally, consciously or unconsciously? Who does not see themselves as being corroded, pockmarked, and deficient? I don’t think anybody does, and that is at the deepest level of our consciousness. All that and more goes into that stunning statement about our hearts condemning us. That’s who we are, condemned by our own hearts. This is why I say it takes enormous amounts of time and real attention and peace to even be able to plumb the issue of where and how our hearts condemn us. Frankly, I’m not so sure it’s a depthless reality, but it’s as close to depthless as anything I know.

"If our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts." What does this mean? It’s simply all right, everything's all right... No that’s too vague and abstract. What does it mean to say that God is greater than our hearts? The first thing it means is this: the notion of self-condemnation is a notion that makes us radically self-contained. How much of our lives are simply set up as disguises or battlements against the outside to protect that condemnable heart. The fruit of that is of course a growing isolation. To put it another way, who is not pinioned on his or her past? What the author is saying here is not a sort of mindless pacification. There is something larger. First of all it says that in that very self-knowledge that so privatises us and isolates us we are encompassed by God. We are encompassed by this mysterious other, so that our judgements on ourselves are not in any way ultimate or determinative. God stands there larger than our hearts and encompassing our hearts, breaking the power of the past that has paralysed us and given us a place to go and given us a future and second chance.

Well, there is something even larger than the Church of the Second Chance here. There is this infinite room, this infinite space... There is a call forward even beyond our own self-knowledge. There is no way I can simply reason myself to that. I have to live myself into that kind of awareness and that kind of self-understanding. It’s interesting, and I don’t know whether this was done on purpose or not, but there is this botanical image that is part of Jesus’ Farewell Discourse in the Gospel of John...( Interesting text by the way... This great monologue that the authors created for Jesus at the Last Supper, the Farewell discourse, is fully a quarter of the length of the entire Gospel and its sheer length testifies to what the authors thought was its depth and significance.) So you get this image that without me, unless you abide in me, you can’t do anything... I used to read that and be really frightened by it because it sounded like a warning: "if you don’t stay in this place, you are in big trouble..." And God knows that the Church that I grew up with precisely gave substance to that kind of fear, and still does to some extent. That’s why it is interesting to pair that with this thing from the First Letter of John which came out of what has been misleadingly called a "Mystical Community." Abiding in Jesus in this context means precisely allowing one’s self, maybe even "coercing" one’s self, to move beyond one’s own self-assessment, and the entrapment of one’s past, and judgements on one’s self, toward God who is always, as we know in the figure of Jesus, larger than our hearts. This man eats with sinners, and takes women seriously, and spends a disproportionate time with handicapped people, people literally impure and excluded. It is out of that memory of this man that the author of the First Letter of John came to see as a good Jew what Judaism had always said but now, in Jesus, became inescapably clear: God is greater than our hearts.

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RT 8/5/97