• Acts of the Apostles 7: 55-60

Raymond Brown shows through a detailed analysis of the  story of martyrdom of Stephen in Luke’s Acts of the Apostles the  parallels with Luke’s version of the death of Jesus in his gospel.  (A Once and Coming Spirit, pp 49-50)

• Psalm 31: 1-5

Using recurring images and even complete phrases from other psalms and the Books of Jeremiah and Jonah, the psalmist composes a model supplication to God.  The image of God bending down to help is intimate and vivid.

• I Peter 2: 2-10

Drawing directly from the psalms and Isaiah, the writer of this epistle re-shapes the familiar proclamation about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus as one who was once rejected, but now is the “chief cornerstone.”  Expanding on the metaphor, he writes, those who believe are “living stones” in a new entity, the church, whose mission is to “proclaim the might acts” of God.

• John 14: 1-14

Believe/trust God; believe/trust me, John’s Jesus tells his disciples as he introduces some key teachings, which build in this excerpt until they reach a startling climax.  His fate, Jesus begins to explain, is “the way” he travels so that those who follow him will come along, too, and arrive at his “Father’s house,” where rooms have been prepared.   Thomas is baffled.  “Lord, we do not know where you are going.  How can we know the way?”  John’s Jesus explains that he is “the way, the truth and the life.”  Then he intensifies the claim:  “If you know me, you will know the Father also.”  Now Philip is confused.  “Show us the Father and we will be satisfied.”  Jesus becomes exasperated.  “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?”  This exchange leads to a further intensification by Jesus of the equivalency between himself and the Father: “whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”  John’s Jesus then names the single criterion by which they can/should know for sure his actual identity: the words and works of Jesus are identical to the Father’s:  “I am in the Father and the Father is in me…”  What guarantee does Jesus offer to back up this claim?  –“the works themselves.”   But these words/works of the Father, which are identical to the words/works of Jesus will not stop when he returns to the Father.  Now comes the startling climax of this passage: “the one who believes in me will also do the work I do, in fact, will do greater works…” (!)  Indeed, the return of Jesus to the Father will enable him to grant “whatever you ask in my name.”

For all the dazzling innovations and unique amendments, John’s gospel has a single, clear, consistent message:  Jesus, who was present at creation, and, after his resurrection returned to the Father, was the exact replica among humankind of the Father in word and in deed, which John sums up in one irreducible trait: “God is love.”  This is the claim that cuts through every bit of distraction (religious or otherwise) that has or ever will be produced and gives the Christian gospel its power and its coherence.  What is God’s nature? Love.  What is God’s purpose? Love.  What is God’s method?  Love.  And if these declarations were not staggering enough, John makes an even more startling assertion: you– dear reader/follower– can follow this same path and achieve more than Jesus did!  (Luke’s account of the martyrdom of Stephen, among the first followers,  parallels the death of Jesus as an audacious suggestion that we can mimic Jesus.)  The scriptures are wily, clever, creative, effective and worldly (in the sense of  possessing a through knowledge of human nature), but they are also daring, blunt and clear about God’s purposes and intentions.  In this excerpt from John’s long teaching section, God’s mission, which was embodied in Jesus, is now transferred to those who follow him!  Just as God entrusted this mission and message to one man, Jesus, whose fate was at the mercy of flawed individuals and human institutions, so now God entrusts this mission and message to the same people who enabled the execution of Jesus!   Their (our) connection to God is directly through the knowledge and love of Jesus.  What a glorious and surprising promise to such unlikely people.  

Citing Von Balthasar’s insistence  that the church, despite its human agents,  is the body of Christ only because Christ is the head, Michael Jinkins writes:

“While speaking of the church as the body of Christ, we are at the very same time of the church, universal and particular, as a social and historical fact among other social and historical facts, as principality and a power among other powers, as a center of political agenda-making and scheming, as a community of human beings fraught with frailty in whom the Spirit of God dwells like a priceless treasure in an earthen vessel.  To recognize the facticity, frailty and fallenness of the church need not take away from the faith-full recognition of the church as the Body of Christ (any more than the christological recognition that God was incarnate in our humanity takes away from the wonder of Christ indwelling our actual fallen human flesh)”  (The Church Faces Death: Ecclesiology in a Post-Modern Context, pp 94-95)

The scriptures have no illusions about the real extent of personal and institutional failures.  (The the execution of Jesus and the martyrdom of a first follower, Stephen, are just two dreadful reminders.)  But the claim is that to just such failed people and institutions God now entrusts the message and ministry: “God is love.”  And, with a promise from Jesus that leaves us baffled and reeling: “the one who believes in me will also do the work I do, in fact, will do greater works.”