York Minster

That your joy may be complete John 15. 9-17

Date: 17th May 2009
Preacher: The Reverend Canon Jeremy Fletcher

People describe their realisation of their advancing years in different ways. It may be that police officers are looking younger, or the conductors of major orchestras look like friends of your children, or that in your day every MP had a moat and would never have had it cleaned on expenses. For some of us in the church it is that the Bishops are getting younger and look like friends of your children. It’s exacerbated because you always referred to them by their title rather than their family name – so the Bishop of Durham is always David Jenkins to me, and I have to remember that there have been a couple since then. And, I’m afraid, there is only one Bishop of Repton. 

Bishop Stephen Verney retired in the 1980’s, and I heard him speak a few times when we lived in the Derby Diocese. He comes from an ancient family, and was an intelligence officer during the war, working behind the lines in Crete. When he writes about the Greek of the Gospel of John it comes with the knowledge of what it was to be in a small group, hunted to death. His book Water into Wine makes full use of that depth of knowledge of language and experience. I count it as a great gift from God that, having lost my treasured copy, someone gave me another as a leaving present when we came here. It’s a book I always turn to when preaching on John’s Gospel.

I had hoped that Bishop Stephen would come my rescue today. Along with everyone else in the major denominations of the western church – because we all use the same lectionary -  I have had to wrestle with the problem which Canon Draper outlined last week: these chapters of John are not easily divided into digestible portions. Last week’s reading about abiding in the vine only makes real sense with Jesus’s words about his followers having his joy, and this weeks gospel reading which has the words about joy only makes sense in the light of that and with the words which follow about living lives in what can be a hostile world: our daily life should be characterised by our love for each other and our willingness to walk the same way as the persecuted Christ.

So I hoped Bishop Stephen would have many words to say about this passage. Well, he only has one paragraph. But listen to part of it.

“[These verses] have about them such a quality of joy and Love and glory that whenever we read them we can only believe that the risen Jesus is speaking them out of heaven. Not out of the old heaven…but out of the new heaven which is married to the new earth. Through his victory over death, the eternal life of the new age has already begun…”

Remember that John the Evangelist describes Jesus speaking these words on the night of his betrayal, the day before his death. How on earth can Jesus, knowing this, speak about “joy” and “love”? The atmosphere should rather have caused him to speak of fear and hatred. It does helps to know that the words used for “joy” and “love”, don’t refer to the ephemeral experience of being happy and being attracted to someone. There are other Greek words for that. These words lead us to the very heart of our relationship with God. “Joy” here is “chara”, the word used in the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures to denote the rejoicing when God comes in power to rescue his people, the joy which is a result of God’s saving action. It is the rejoicing which explodes from the people of God when all enemies have been vanquished, when the new age of justice and righteousness is ushered in. There is such joy because the future is utterly secure. 

From Chapter 13 through to Chapter 17 of John’s gospel Jesus speaks time and again about his indivisible relationship with the Father, and that we who are ‘in Christ’ abide, or dwell, or live, in Christ just as Christ lives in God. In Christ we can never be removed from the embrace of God’s love, the gift of God’s grace, our place in God’s presence. Joy, chara, is the deep rooted and unshakeable knowledge that we already live in heaven with God, that eternal life is not for the future only but is ours now, that Christ’s presence at the right hand of God means that we are there too.  Heaven is not ‘in the balance’. It is guaranteed. And that means that whatever happens to us now, we remain within the love of God. It does not take the pain away – after saying these words Jesus would soon be in Gethsemane and in agony. But it surrounds our agony with the reality of hope, and with our ultimate triumph in God. We may be unhappy. But this is not the opposite of joy. Joy is not giggling. It is a fountain of life.

So Jesus can then invite his friends to ‘love’ each other. It’s another big Greek word: “agape”. Not attraction, or friendship or family relationship. This is complete self giving to another, and to all others. Jesus would show them what that meant the very next day, and speaks of it here by saying that the greatest love is to lay down your life out of no motive but the greater good of others. If our happiness depends on what we possess, what our reputation is, what position we hold, which football team is doing well, which concerts we are going to, which invitations are on our mantelpiece, what salary we earn, then we will always treat people as a means to an end. If our joy is in the God who has loved us without limit and in whose love we can always trust, then we are released to love all people, to see in every other person a part of the image of God. Our life means little, because God’s life in us means everything.

In John Chapter 15 Jesus speaks words to his disciples on a night overflowing with significance: this is his last conversation before he is ripped from the gathering and stripped of everything. But, as the Bishop of Repton (and I am sorry to Henry, David and Humphrey who have followed), Bishop Stephen reminds us, these are words spoken by the Son of God who, though fragile and vulnerable on earth, is right at the heart of his Father. These are words from heaven. And they are spoken to us to remind us and reassure us that, because he is there, we are there too. They invite us to be joyful because there is more than this, and the more is ours – in God we have complete joy, full joy, total joy. They invite us to love each other as Jesus loved us, and we can, because he still loves us, and still invites us to eat his meal and find his life. As Bishop Stephen says, when we hear these words
“the Light is opening our eyes, and the Love is raising us from the dead”.

Alleluia, Christ is risen.
He is risen indeed. Alleluia.