Don Friesen
One of the folk songs of my generation encourages us to "teach our children well". It was written by Graham Nash, who is also a photographer and collector of photographs, and who says that the immediate inspiration for the song came from a famous photograph by Diane Arbus entitled, "Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park". (1962) The image, depicting a child with an angry expression holding the toy weapon, prompted Nash to reflect on the implications of messages given to children about war and other things. One of the first public performances of the song, "Teach your Children" (Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Deja Vu album, 1970), performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, took place in 1969 at a San Francisco rally against the Vietnam war.
We all want to teach our children well, although often this maxim is reduced to a vacuous encouragement to pursue excellence. The story of Nicodemus, as told in our Gospel reading, prompted me to reflect on our relationship to the world we live in, and in that regard to provide some content for our well-intentioned teaching. Allow me to suggest – briefly – three things to teach our children about the world, and our place in it, and our attitude toward it. These are three basic teachings that emerge from the Gospel of John in this regard and that serve to remind us of our identity and our purpose as a Christian community.
1) God So Loved the World
The first teaching is lifted from our Gospel reading, and is one that we should all know from memory: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16, RSV) And its companion verse, "For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved...." (John 3:17, RSV)
God loves this world! Despite our wars; despite our jealousies and fears and exploitation and greed and maiming of the earth, God loves this world, and God loves us! Despite all of the evidence we've accumulated over the millennia to show that the fall of humanity portrayed in Genesis 3 appears to be our prototype rather than the harmony of Genesis 1, God loves this world! It is not God's desire to condemn the world.
God loves this world and desires its redemption! God desires not just the redemption of a chosen few, not just the redemption of the West or the East, not just the redemption of whites, or blacks, or Asians, or those who are of a certain height. God desires the redemption of the whole world!
Our Gospel reading says that "God so loved the world...." This is not an infatuation on God's part. It means that God loves this world very much, but the word, "so," is even stronger than the word, "very". Every once in a while Elsa K presents me with cinnamon rolls she has baked. If I say to her, "The cinnamon rolls were very good," that's a compliment," but when I say to her, "Those cinnamon rolls were soooo good," Elsa knows that I r-e-a-l-l-y liked them.
God so loves the whole world that it's not surprising that in both the Old and New Testaments we are given glorious descriptions of all the nations of the world gathered around the throne of God – a diversity of people united in common worship.
To teach our children that God so loves the world is to give them a positive, redemptive, and hopeful attitude toward the world, which has a host of implications for the way we treat each other, others, as well as creation. It means that our first impulse is not to fear or to condemn the world, but to love it, and to have its well-being always in mind.
In New Testament times Rome was pulling the peoples of the western world into a single empire and propagating the notion that all human beings are of one family. However, what for Rome was an intellectual concept and a political strategy, reinforced with force, was for Jesus a matter of the spirit, and an aspiration of the heart. Steeped in the writings of Isaiah, Jesus envisioned a huge table at which all the peoples of the earth would feast and enjoy, not only the richest food and the finest wine (Isaiah 25:6), but the harmony and well-being of a humanity in communion with its Creator.
2) Jesus/We Is/Are Not of this World
A second teaching the Gospel of John provides has to do with our place in the world. A few weeks ago Craig preached on the difficult text in John 17 that suggests that while we are in the world, we are not of the world. (John 17:11, 14, 16, 18) It's a difficult concept, but it suggests that there is something about our world-view – our vision of the world – that transcends the world, as we know it now. There is something about our Christian calling that does not quite fit into the mould or shape of the world, as it is at the moment. We are always left with a measure of discomfort. One example is our calling to peace and reconciliation in a world presently at war.
To teach our children that we are in, but not of, the world is to recognize that the world has not yet been fully redeemed and that there are forces at work in this world that are contrary to the love of God and that frustrate attempts to reconcile humankind to God. The new world order is in great dis-order; poverty, hunger, war and suffering continue to be facts of life for most of the world's population.
To teach our children that we are not of this world is to encourage them to go beyond conventional ways of looking at this world, and through spiritual transformation begin to look at this world through the eyes of God. We need to develop an eye that can perceive God's love working out its purposes, an eye that can perceive how each person, each group, each thing has its proper place in the divine scheme of things.
To teach our children that we are not of this world is to help them to understand that they have a part to play in the salvation of the world – in salvation history, the history of God's love at work in the world. It is to help them to understand that each of our lives, as insignificant as each one may seem within a global context, is in reality indispensable to God's plan.
3) Jesus is the Light of the World
A third thing to teach our children is the Gospel of John's repeated assertion that Jesus is the light of the world, an assertion he often puts into Jesus' own mouth; for example, in John, chapter 8, verse 12, Jesus says: "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life." Chapter 9, verse 5: "As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world." Chapter 12, verse 46: "I have come as light into the world, that everyone who believes in me should not remain in the darkness."
There is an assumption in the Gospel of John that Jesus is a key figure in the world's illumination and redemption. Now, sometimes Jesus is an embarrassment to Christians. We're embarrassed by the Church's triumphalism of the past. Sometimes, someone (Hans Küng) has noted, Jesus is more popular outside the Church than in the Church! We are loath to hold up Jesus as the light of the world because it might shed some light on our own ambivalence about him.
It's foolish, however, to forfeit such a rich spiritual resource. To teach our children that Jesus is the light of the world is to recognize that it is at Jesus' side that we learned that grace takes precedence over condemnation. It is at Jesus' side that we learned that peace is better than war. It is at Jesus' side that we learned that justice should temper power. It is at Jesus' side – and by the wounds in his side – that we learned, in a most vivid way, what it means for God to love the world. Jesus, whom God sent to proclaim and demonstrate His love, did so by touching and healing a lonely leper, by sharing a meal with a detested tax-collector, by accepting the welcome of an outcast woman, and by crossing cultural and racial barriers to welcome a Samaritan woman. In many other ways Jesus demonstrated that the loving and welcoming arms of God are spread much wider than we are apt to spread our own.
It is at Jesus' side that we watched him get on his knees and wash his disciples' feet. It is at the side of Jesus' cross that we watched him forgive his enemies, even as he taught us to love our enemies. Surely someone who taught us these things can shed some light on the destructive and dysfunctional dynamics of this world! Surely his light of love and forgiveness and grace and justice should not be concealed! Let Jesus' spirit permeate the world! As a wise saint (Hans Küng) of the Church has pointed out, "Only when it becomes clear what (Jesus) himself wanted, what hopes he brought for the people of his own time, can it also become clear what he himself has to say to the people of the present time, what hopes he can offer for (hu)mankind today and for a future world." (Küng, On Being a Christian, page 166)
Let's not pass on to our children a domesticated Jesus, a harmless household pet, if you please. Let's pass on the real Jesus, and help to unleash the ferment his words and spirit have unleashed in other times. Let's not put a veil over the illumination Jesus provides. Let's lift him up! Lift high the cross, and allow Jesus' provocativeness to challenge all peoples, inspiring us all to review and reform our habits, our thought patterns, and our world-views.
Let's teach our children well, and let's teach them that "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved...." (John 3:16-17, RSV) Let's teach them that while we are in the world, we are not of the world. (John 17:11, 14, 16, 18) And let's teach them that Jesus is the light of the world. If we do, we may just cast more light than shadow on the world around us.
Quotations of Scripture are from the New Revised Standard Version, unless otherwise noted.