Liturgically, we have a weird situation today in that it is sort of an uneasy compromise between the renewal of the liturgy at the Second Vatican Council and the most ancient traditions. As you can see, the vestments and decorations are green, thus, representing ordinary time. But in the earliest days this was the concluding day of the Christmas celebration which always, as I mentioned last Sunday, involved those three stages of manifestation of the divine: the appearance of the Magi, the baptism of Jesus and then the wedding at Cana. And if you read the sermons by some of the early preachers they unite those three because it was supposed to be a single manifestation of the presence of God in the world. And this is primarily what Christmas was understood to be, rather than the birth of Jesus. I go through all of this because what I want to do is use today as a kind of reprise or summary for the Christmas season and the readings today are very helpful in doing this.

The fourth Gospel, the Gospel According to John, or Johanna (some people think it might have been a woman who finally edited this text), is in many ways the most subtle of the four Gospels. The writer and the editors clearly were doing something very sophisticated and nowhere more is that the case than in his/her treatment of the miracles of Jesus. In the Gospel of John, the miracles are never called what they are called in the other three Gospels: acts of power. Here, they are called "semia", signs. And I want to talk about this business of signs. For example, what is the meaning behind the first of Jesus' signs in the Gospel of John? As the majority of scholars put it, this sign contains water as a symbol. Water is a standard part of Jewish purification and ritual self-consciousness up until the time of Jesus. Water now becomes transmuted into something much richer in the presence of this Jew, Jesus. So, now Judaism takes on a much larger and fuller form in the presence of Jesus. Thus, as the Jews believed, God is continuing to act in human history in order to clarify His/Her purposes. What is being signified in this situation is that we have a new stage in God's approach to humanity, a richer, fuller and, if you will, more luxuriant stage.

How does this serve our purposes for the manifestation of Jesus? It is very interesting that one of the few things that we know about the historical Jesus is that he grew up in Northern Palestine, far from the Temple. The point here is that Galilee was referred to as the Galilee of the Gentiles - - these were the people who were not religiously kosher; these were the people who were not as religiously observant as the officials thought they should have been. And the point I want to make, and the point that the texts make, is very simple: now, in Jesus, in this human being, the heart of religion, what it is to be religious, is manifest. Therefore, first of all, we are not to look at ecclesiastical institutions, mainly the official Judaism, or rather we should say the official Judaisms of Jesus' time. Hence, what is radically altered and radically relativized is the normative status of any of those, bureaucratic forms of religiosity. It is in this man Jesus, this human being, that the reality of God is to be approached and understood.

Of course, we all know that in the Gospel tradition Jesus as a good Jew constantly had fights with other good Jews. For instance, Jesus argued over whether he should cure on the Sabbath or whether he should observe the laws of purification - - for example, washing his hands before he ate. In other words, he argued over whether or not he should observe all the bureaucratic niceties and dot all the institutional i's and cross all the institutional t's. And here in this extraordinary development we believe that God said, "No. If you really want to know what it is to be religious look at this human being in his humanity". You see, this is what the Gospel of John does and it is quite interesting to see how sharply this is developed over and against the treatment of miracles in the so-called Synoptic Gospels.

The Synoptic Gospels say that the miracles were never a means to come to faith in God. Never. And I have to emphasize this because there are all kinds of miracle stories abroad, for example on television, that argue precisely for the opposite. The people who create these miracle stories have not read the texts carefully. The Gospel of Mark says clearly that Jesus could not do anything spectacular because of the peoples' lack of faith. And if you read the Synoptic Gospels it is always that "Your faith has made you whole". Thus, already there is the belief that here in this man Jesus the reality of God is somehow accessible.

The Gospel of John does it quite differently. This is evident because the author or the editor makes the point of distinguishing peoples' response to Jesus, particularly after the feeding of the 5,000. There Jesus complains that people are after him because they had a free lunch. "You are here because you had something to eat". And in a society that was pre-MacDonald's and pre-Burger King, where most of the people went hungry most of the time, that is no small objection. So, the Jesus in the Gospel of John says: "You've missed the point. The point is that, if you want to be fully human then you have to participate with me as I am human, not because I can do all of these tricks. You look at the world the way I look at the world. You respond to people the way I respond to people". And it is only by looking at Jesus the man that belief in the divinity of Jesus emerged historically. It is only because they looked at this man so closely and intensely and became puzzled and said, "There is something more going on here". But please note the process, which is what I am trying to get at - - it is only because they looked at this human being and the way this particular human being operated that something else emerged.

You see, we have got it backwards most of the time and we read these miracles improperly because we only recognize the miraculous element instead of Jesus' humanity. All we have to do is see how Jesus, this man who put on his pants one leg at a time, operated. The heart of the problem is that it is much easier to point to large buildings, big bank accounts, massive ceremonies, great vestments and nice wardrobes and say, "By God, that is where power is and power is God and that is where I want to be!". No, this is not where the truth lies. It has been said here and in the Gospels over and over that we have bureaucratized our ears to the extent that we cannot even hear these things straight ourselves most of the time. In the Gospels it is written: "Whoever wants to be the boss must be the servant of all". And they mean it! The word "servant" in this context is understood in terms of real human relationships, not bureaucratic niceties and protocol. It is uncanny to me how in my own head, and how I see it over and over in our world, we can distort and caricature this, and call the distortion authentic.

Finally, what is it that is characteristic of this man? Well, a whole variety of proposals are possible. Let me just make one proposal. I recently read an article by my favorite German theologian, John Baptist Metz, who does what any good theologian does: he caught me up short. He made this simple observation on the career of Jesus:   "All religious people are running around looking for sin. Where is sin, we must get rid of sin. Jesus did not look for sin, he only looked for suffering". That is all. And then he acted. It is embarrassing for me to admit this because I have said from this pulpit over and over that the normative text for me out of the whole New Testament is the great judgement scene from the twenty-sixth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew: "I was in jail and you visited me...I was a stranger and you took me in...I was naked and you clothed me...I was hungry and you fed me...I was homeless and you gave me accommodations". And I had to wait until I was sixty-two and I was reading John Baptist Metz to say: "No. All this talk is about suffering, not sin". The business of judgement is about our response to suffering in this world. That is it. It is as simple as that and it is terrifying. It is terrifying because I cannot live the way I live if this is true. I cannot do this and be honest with myself.

Therefore, what is manifest at the end of the Christmas season? God, mother-like, hovering over us tenderly, concerned about how we oppress each other in so many ways and wanting to do something about it. And we recognize God's movement toward us in this man Jesus, this human being with nothing other than his own humanity as his credentials.

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Created: 30 Nov 1996
© Copyright: R. Trojcak, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002
London Ontario Canada
Last Update: September 05, 2005
Comments: rtrojcak@hotmail.com