Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging (13 page)

In a flash of intuitive understanding, John experiences Jesus as the human face of the God who is love. And in coming to know who the Great Rabbi is, John discovers who
he
is
 
—the disciple Jesus loved. Years later, the evangelist would write, “In love there can be no fear, but fear is driven out by perfect love: because to fear is to expect punishment, and anyone who is afraid is still imperfect in love” (1 John 4:18).

Beatrice Bruteau wrote, “To know the subject, you have to enter inside the subject, enter into that subject’s own awareness, that is, have the same awareness yourself in your own subjectivity: ‘Let that mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus’” (Philippians 2:6).
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I sense this is what happened in the Upper Room. Not only did the beloved disciple come to know Jesus, but the meaning of all that Jesus had taught suddenly exploded like a starburst. “I first learned the Word of God when the Great Rabbi held me silently against his heart.”
For John, the heart of Christianity was not an inherited doctrine but a message born of his own experience. And the message he declared was, “God is love” (1 John 4:16).

Philosopher Bernard Lonergan once noted, “All religious experience at its roots is an experience of an unconditional and unrestricted being in love.”
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The recovery of passion begins with the recovery of my true self as the beloved. If I find Christ, I will find myself, and if I find my true self, I will find Him. This is the goal and purpose of our lives. John did not believe that Jesus was the most important thing; he believed that Jesus was the only thing. For “the disciple Jesus loved,” anything less was not genuine faith.

I believe that the night in the Upper Room was the defining moment of John’s life. Some sixty years after Christ’s resurrection, the apostle
 
—like an old gold miner panning the stream of his memories
 
—recalled all that had transpired during his three-year association with Jesus. He made pointed reference to that holy night when it all came together, and he affirmed his core identity with these words: “Peter turned and saw the disciple Jesus loved following them
 
—the one who had leaned on his breast at the supper” (John 21:20).

If John were to be asked, “What is your primary identity, your most coherent sense of yourself?” he would not reply, “I am a disciple, an apostle, an evangelist,” but “I am the one Jesus loves.”

The beloved disciple’s intimate encounter with Jesus on Maundy Thursday night did not pass unnoticed in the early church. Offering explicit testimony to John’s authorship of the fourth gospel, Irenaeus (circa AD 180) wrote, “Last of all John, too, the disciple of the Lord who leant against his breast, himself brought out a gospel while he was in Ephesus.”
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To read John 13:23-25 without faith is to read it without profit. To risk the passionate life, we must be “affected” by Jesus as John was; we must engage His experience with our lives rather than with our
memories. Until I lay my head on Jesus’ breast, listen to His heartbeat, and personally appropriate the Christ experience of John’s eye-witness, I have only a
derivative
spirituality. My cunning impostor will borrow John’s moment of intimacy and attempt to convey it as if it were my own.

Once I related the story of an old man dying of cancer.
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The old man’s daughter had asked the local priest to come and pray with her father. When the priest arrived, he found the man lying in bed with his head propped up on two pillows and an empty chair beside his bed. The priest assumed that the old fellow had been informed of his visit. “I guess you were expecting me,” he said.

“No, who are you?”

“I’m the new associate at your parish,” the priest replied. “When I saw the empty chair, I figured you knew I was going to show up.”

“Oh yeah, the chair,” said the bedridden man. “Would you mind closing the door?”

Puzzled, the priest shut the door. “I’ve never told anyone this, not even my daughter,” said the man, “but all my life I have never known how to pray. At the Sunday Mass, I used to hear the pastor talk about prayer, but it always went right over my head. Finally I said to him one day in sheer frustration, ‘I get nothing out of your homilies on prayer.’

“‘Here,’ says my pastor, reaching into the bottom drawer of his desk. ‘Read this book by Hans Urs von Balthasar. He’s a Swiss theologian. It’s the best book on contemplative prayer in the twentieth century.’

“Well, Father,” says the man, “I took the book home and tried to read it. But in the first three pages I had to look up twelve words in the dictionary. I gave the book back to my pastor, thanked him, and under my breath whispered, ‘for nothin.’

“I abandoned any attempt at prayer,” he continued, “until one day about four years ago my best friend said to me, ‘Joe, prayer is just a simple matter of having a conversation with Jesus. Here’s what I suggest.
Sit down on a chair, place an empty chair in front of you, and in faith see Jesus on the chair. It’s not spooky because He promised, “I’ll be with you all days.” Then just speak to Him and listen in the same way you’re doing with me right now.’

“So, Padre, I tried it, and I’ve liked it so much that I do it a couple of hours every day. I’m careful, though. If my daughter saw me talking to an empty chair, she’d either have a nervous breakdown or send me off to the funny farm.”

The priest was deeply moved by the story and encouraged the old guy to continue on the journey. Then he prayed with him, anointed him with oil, and returned to the rectory.

Two nights later the daughter called to tell the priest that her daddy had died that afternoon.

“Did he seem to die in peace?” he asked.

“Yes, when I left the house around two o’clock, he called me over to his bedside, told me one of his corny jokes, and kissed me on the cheek. When I got back from the store an hour later, I found him dead. But there was something strange, Father. In fact, beyond strange
 
—kinda weird. Apparently just before Daddy died, he leaned over and rested his head on a chair beside his bed.”

The Christ of faith is no less accessible to us in His present risenness than was the Christ of history in His human flesh to the beloved disciple. John emphasizes this truth when he quotes the Master: “I tell you the truth, it is to your advantage that I go away” (16:7,
NASB
). Why? How could Jesus’ departure benefit the community of believers? First, “for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I go, I will send Him to you.” Second, while Jesus was still visible on earth, there was the danger that the apostles would be so wedded to the sight of His human body that they would trade the certainty of faith for the tangible evidence of the senses. To have seen Jesus in the flesh was an extraordinary privilege, but more blessed are they who have not seen and yet believe (see John 20:29).

…

In the light of John’s own experience, it comes as no surprise that he puts but one central question to readers of his Gospel: Do you know and love Jesus, who is Messiah and Son of God?

The meaning and fullness of life spring from this. Everything else fades into twilight. As Edgar Bruns writes in his essay
The Art and Thought of John
, “The reader is, as it were, blinded by the brilliance of his image and comes away like a man who has looked long at the sun
 
—unable to see anything but its light.”

Union with Jesus emerges as John’s dominant theme. Through the imagery of the vine and the branches, Christ calls us to inhabit a new space in which we can live without anxiety and fear. “Make your home in me, as I make mine in you” (John 15:4). “Whoever remains in me, with me in him, bears fruit in plenty” (15:5). “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Remain in my love” (15:9).

The poet John Donne cries out for all of us:

     
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

     
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

     
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
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Looking at Jesus through the prism of Johannine values offers unique insight into the priorities of discipleship. One’s personal relationship with Christ towers over every other consideration. What establishes preeminence in the Christian community is not apostleship or ecclesiastical office, nor titles or territory; not the charismatic gifts of tongues, healing, prophecy, or inspired preaching; but only our response to Jesus’ question, “Do you love Me?”

The gospel of John sends a prophetic word to the contemporary church, accustomed to treating charismatic persons with excessive deference: The love of Jesus Christ alone establishes status and confers dignity.
Before Peter was clothed with the mantle of authority, Jesus asked him (not once but three times), “Do you love me?” (John 21:15). The question is not only poignant but also revelatory: “If authority is given, it must be based on love of Jesus.”
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Leadership in the church is not entrusted to successful fund-raisers, brilliant biblical scholars, administrative geniuses, or spellbinding preachers (though these assets may be helpful), but to those who have been laid waste by a consuming passion for Christ
 
—passionate men and women for whom privilege and power are trivial compared to knowing and loving Jesus. Henri Nouwen elaborates on these qualifications for leadership:

We have only to examine the great clefts and fissures in church history, the ragged eras of hatred and strife, to see the disastrous consequences that come when John’s criterion for leadership is ignored. We can only shudder at the pain caused by cavalier Christian crusaders across the centuries in the name of orthodoxy.

…

Throughout my retreat with John as my companion and guide, I was struck by his choice of verbs and adverbs in narrating his own perception of Jesus and that of others.

Upon being told by her sister Martha that Jesus had arrived in Bethany and wanted to see her, “Mary got up
quickly
and went to Him” (11:29, emphasis added).

Mary of Magdala is heartbroken and tearful when she finds the tomb empty. At the moment of recognition when Jesus calls her name, she
clung
to him
 
—“Do not cling to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father” (20:17).

As soon as Peter and John receive word of the empty tomb, they
ran
together to the garden, “but the other disciple, running faster than Peter, reached the tomb first” (20:3-4).

Peter, the denier of Jesus, a failure as a friend in the hour of crisis, a coward in his soul before the servant girl in the courtyard,
jumped
into the water almost naked once John told him Jesus was on shore. “At these words ‘It is the Lord,’ Simon Peter, who had practically nothing on, wrapped his cloak round him and jumped into the water” (21:7). John notes that the boat was about a hundred yards offshore.

These biblical characters, however clean or tawdry their personal histories may have been, are not paralyzed by the past in their present response to Jesus. Tossing aside self-consciousness, they ran, clung, jumped, and raced to Him. Peter denied Him and deserted Him, but he was not afraid of Him.

Suppose for a moment that in a flash of insight you discovered that all your motives for ministry were essentially egocentric, or suppose that last night you got drunk and committed adultery, or suppose that you failed to respond to a cry for help and the person committed suicide. What would you do?

Would guilt, self-condemnation, and self-hatred consume you, or would you jump into the water and swim a hundred yards at breakneck speed toward Jesus? Haunted by feelings of unworthiness, would you allow the darkness to overcome you, or would you let Jesus be who He is
 
—a Savior of boundless compassion and infinite patience, a Lover who keeps no score of our wrongs?

John seems to be saying that the disciples of Jesus ran to Him because they were crazy about Him; or, in the more restrained prose of Raymond Brown, “Jesus was remembered as one who exhibited love in what he did and was loved deeply by those who followed him.”
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The beloved disciple sends a message both to the sinner covered with shame and to the local church, tentative and slow to forgive for fear of appearing lax or liberal. The number of people who have fled the church because it is too patient or compassionate is negligible; the number who have fled because they find it too unforgiving is tragic.

…

When Roslyn and I were courting, I seized every opportunity to visit her in New Orleans. In the spring of 1978, after leading a ten-day retreat in Assisi, Italy, for seventy American and Canadian clergy, I flew back with the group to the Twin Cities, arriving at three a.m.

Weary from jet lag and scheduled to speak the following morning at another conference in San Francisco, the obvious and prudent thing to do was to fly directly to the Bay City. Instead I lingered in Minneapolis until six a.m., caught a flight to New Orleans, and shared a delightful picnic with my beloved on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain before journeying on to San Francisco. I landed at midnight.

The next morning I was bright, alert, and energetic, fired by love’s urgent longings. I was in love with love.