Sermon for the Third Sunday after Easter
“Because I go to the Father”
In “Images of Pilgrimage,” the Rev’d Dr. Robert Crouse wisely advises that “we should stay close to the language of images themselves,” especially “the images of pilgrimage, of wilderness and paradise” that encompass, as he puts it, “the whole of revelation.” This speaks profoundly to our current distresses and confusions about language itself. We have lost the capacity perhaps to think the metaphors and images of Scripture and have defaulted to turning words into things; the reification of images that misconstrues the understanding of ourselves and the created order. The consequence is that there is no self or any nature, any created order. The post-modern despair of metaphysics is premised on the assumption that all we have are words but the words are endlessly empty of meaning.
Yet that sense of the emptiness of meaning, the crisis of meaninglessness in the contemporary world, paradoxically leads to assertions and claims about meaning and identity that are entirely arbitrary; it is all a power game about who controls the narratives. In a way it is an attempt to fill the vacuum that we ourselves have created but only by two contradictory assertions: first, that words create reality (they don’t); and second, that words are essentially meaningless (they aren’t), or, at the very least, there is an endless deferral of meaning (there isn’t despite changes in meaning).
God speaks the world and the world of things into being. We don’t. At best we are “secondary creators.” Certainly language either shapes and helps our understanding of things or distorts and hinders our understanding of the givenness of the world and ourselves in it. Words matter but not when they become things, mere commodities to be used and consumed. Not when they are used to control thought rather than enable our thinking.
The Eastertide readings are a profound treatise about thinking the images of revelation and thus of finding ourselves within the understanding which they offer. The recurring phrase in the last three Sundays after Easter is “because I go to the Father.” Taken from the so-called ‘farewell discourse” of Jesus in John’s Gospel, it grounds the whole pilgrimage of the soul in the pilgrimage of the Son to the Father. Nowhere are we taught more clearly about the reality of God as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost than in these readings. It is what Jesus himself teaches and makes known in the face of our confusions and uncertainties. And, here, it is taught even through the realities of the human condition of suffering and tribulation. One cannot help but note the wonder of metaphor that opens us out to a larger understanding of our humanity which transcends the limits of human experience but without negating its different forms which belong to the created order.
