Sermon Audio
The Sunday Next Before Advent
Sagrada Familia
St. John 20:1-29
In 1992 my old job took me to Barcelona for the Olympic Games. I spent a thoroughly enjoyable three weeks there and, at the end of the games, Marjorie joined me for some vacation time touring Spain.
We began right there in Barcelona, and one of our stops was at the Sagrada Familia, or “Holy Family,” church. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage site and, almost two decades after our visit, Pope Benedict XVI consecrated it and named it a minor basilica. That’s another way of saying it is not a cathedral, for a bishop must sit at a cathedral, and no bishop could or would sit at Sagrada Familia.
And that brings us to the reason for which the church is most famous: Construction began in 1882 and the structure is still not complete. Difficulties with funding proved a drag.
The Spanish Civil War, which broke out in 1936, slowed the work and, worse than that, resulted in considerable damage to the building and destruction of original plans as well as drawings and photographs.
The war eventually ended but the nation has not healed to this day. Spain is a patchwork of provinces and principalities stitched together into a political quilt that has never attained any semblance of unity beyond uneasy and fragile alliances.
In the apartment my colleagues and I rented for the Barcelona Olympics, flags of the Province of Catalonia hung from most of the balconies in the inner courtyard of the building while the Spanish standard was nowhere in sight. In our flat, a sign stuck to the wall over the telephone reminded its usual residents, in the local language, “Speak Catalan Only.”
This sort of assertion of Catalonian defiance of the central government in Madrid appeared everywhere. And in an upside-down, inside-out sort of way, the pieces of the picture – suspicion, mistrust and outright revolution in the nation, fracture and incompletion in the church – seem to fit.
If we take a step back from the traditional perception of the Holy Family as Jesus, Mary and Joseph and project it as the church on earth, what do we find? Dispute, division, even unbridled hostility . . . and most of all impermanence and insecurity.
We ache to be a final unity, one in Jesus Christ our Lord, and yet we know ourselves to be fragmented and far from finished.
Sagrada Familia is a splendid, ragged, hopeful, somewhat architecturally confused edifice, and so, beloved, are we. Jesus Christ, our chief cornerstone, remains resolutely in place; the rest of us are a building that has been going up forever and keeps falling down.
We have arrived at the final sermon in our Trinity season series on the Gospel of St. John. We come today to the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and in this story we find a family that loves passionately, doubts divisively and fears fallibly.
It is a family coming to grips with radically changed relationships. Even way back then, and certainly today, it is flailing to negotiate the path of brotherly love through the chaos of a sin-soaked world.
(Read text.)
Some years ago I had a young Mexican-American friend named Roman who worked in youth ministry. One day, he and I were in a group discussing the resurrection story in St. John’s gospel when Roman startled us all with the declaration, “Jesus was a Mexican.”
Now, a certain amount of pride in one’s people is understandable, even commendable. Wouldn’t the chest of a Swedish Christian, or a Nigerian or a Hungarian, puff up just a bit if he could claim our Lord Christ as one of his own?
Trouble is, any Christian of any race or nationality knows the Bible tells us Jesus was a Palestinian Jew. What could Roman possibly mean by his bold assertion that “Jesus was a Mexican”?
We stared at him for a minute and then I said, “What do you mean Jesus was a Mexican? How could you possibly say a thing like that?”
“It’s obvious,” Roman said nonchalantly, as though he had declared, “Today is Sunday.”
“Mary Magdalene thought He was the gardener. He had to be a Mexican.”
To quote the Scriptures, Jesus wept.
The radically redefined relationships of the resurrection begin long before the resurrection. As with all human relationships, the pattern first appears in the Trinity.
If I told you the Father loves the Son, you would tell me, “Well, duh.” But let’s consider that statement. To begin, Yahweh has only recently become “Father.” In the Old Testament, Yahweh is “God” and “Lord” but He is almost never “Father.”
Where He is, the prophet Isaiah is revealing the Son as the Suffering Servant and the Anointed One – Messiah – who will come to save God’s people. The prophet thus uses “Father” and “Son” to distinguish these two members of the Trinity. But Yahweh is not presented as “Father” to His covenant people.
In the New Testament, everything changes. Over and again, God on high appears as “Father” to His beloved children below. He remains distinct from us – of a different essence; there is no blood tie – but look at what has changed.
God has put on flesh and become a brother to you and to me. And if He is our brother, His Father is our Father. Our relationship to them remains rooted in their relationship to one another.
The Son has gone to the cross and, so doing, He has submitted perfectly to the Father’s will, winning ultimate glory for Himself . . . and subsidiary glory for His brothers and sisters, who now in the resurrection see the door into the holy presence in the divine realm of glory flung wide open.
The resurrection, as one old theologian put it, is God’s “Amen!” to Christ’s “It is finished.”
And so it is, for the risen Son will now ascend to His Father’s side. He will take up His rightful place upon that throne He occupied before the world began, that throne He abandoned for those 33 agonizing years of separation to submit to the Father’s perfect plan for redeeming that wayward race that is mankind.
Walk with me now past the empty tomb and consider the momentous changes in the family of God.
In the other three gospels, multiple women go to the tomb early on Easter morning. In the Fourth Gospel, only Mary Magdalene is mentioned. John probably uses her as a representative of the group. She uses the plural in addressing Peter and John: “we do not know where they have laid Him.”
This Mary, who acquired a tarnished and undeserved reputation in the early days of the church, is the one from who Jesus had cast out seven demons. Like all of the other witnesses of the empty tomb, including the disciples, she fails in the moment to grasp the significance of what her eyes behold.
Two angels in white ask the cause of her tears and she explains that her Lord’s body is missing and she yearns to know where to find it. She turns around and sees Jesus – but fails to recognize Him. He addresses her as “woman” – not as jarring a form of address as it sounds to our ears but neither is it a term of intimacy.
But then Jesus calls her by her name – “Mary!” and she responds instantly, falling to the ground and grasping his feet and crying out, “Rabboni,” which is, translated literally, “my Teacher.”
The gospels give us no other picture so intimate as this one. The Lord triggers her response of worship by using her name.
And we are reminded of what John has told us: "To him the doorkeeper opens, and the sheep hear his voice; and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. And when he brings out his own sheep, he goes before them; and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice” (St. John 10:3-4).
As for Jesus’ perplexing response – “Do not cling to Me, for I have not yet ascended to My Father . . .” – scholars have spilt oceans of ink in an effort to explain it. We will content ourselves with a simple rationale that seems the best: Mary has seized His feet as though to pin Him firmly to the earth and prevent His departure. She is delirious with joy and wants to prolong the moment. Her Lord tells her gently but firmly that His ascension is not happening forthwith.
He will be with them a while longer, and much remains to be done. He dispatches her to inform His disciples that He will indeed soon ascend . . . but He does not use the word “disciples.” Instead, He says, “go to my brothers (ESV).”
What has John reported? He has quoted the Lord: "In My Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also” (St/ John 14:2-3).
His Father’s house will be their house, His brothers’ house.
Mary does not skedaddle to Jesus’ brothers by blood; she understands perfectly that He refers to those who have followed Him in faith. It is these who will take up eternal residence in His Father’s house because in becoming His brothers they have become sons of His Father.
And so He instructs Mary, “. . . say to them, ‘I am ascending to My Father and to your Father, and to My God and to your God.”
In Israel, family relationship passed through the blood, through clearly defined and meticulously documented bloodlines in the nation and in the tribes. In the new dispensation, faith and obedience trump blood.
When the Lord was teaching in a house in a certain village, some reported to Him that His mother and brothers were waiting outside, wishing to see Him. He replied: “My mother and My brothers are these who hear the word of God and do it” (Luke 8:21).
The New Testament enshrines this concept of brotherhood by faith as though it were the very cross of Christ itself. St. Paul tells the Romans: “For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs -- heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together” (8:15-17).
The author of Hebrews, echoing Psalm 22, assures us: “But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, for the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, that He, by the grace of God, might taste death for everyone. For it was fitting for Him, for whom are all things and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings.
“For both He who sanctifies and those who are being sanctified are all of one, for which reason He is not ashamed to call them brethren, saying: ‘I will declare Your name to My brethren; in the midst of the assembly I will sing praise to You.’ And again: ‘I will put My trust in Him.’ And again: ‘Here am I and the children whom God has given Me’” (Psalm 22:9-13).
And so, beloved brothers and sisters, our resurrected Lord has spanned the gulf we dug with the spades of our sin between ourselves and our God. Making us His brothers He has made us His Father’s sons and daughters.
In the crucifixion account preceding this passage, Christ gathered up temporal and spiritual family relations in one bundle. From His cross He looked down upon His mother Mary and, indicating the Apostle John standing beside her, said, “Woman, behold your son!” And to John, “Behold your mother!”
He was binding over responsibility for a widowed woman to a trusted comrade, of course, arranging for Mary to be looked after for the remainder of her days. But on a higher plane Christ was affirming an eternal tie binding a brother of God the Son to the mother of the Son of God.
Now, we must not leave this brief overview of resurrection relations without spending a moment on the one character remaining in this swirling drama of despair and doubt and wonder and awe. I refer, of course, to the apostle sometimes affectionately referred to as “Doubting Thomas.”
We should regard him with some affection, for if we’re honest we must see some of ourselves in him.
To put matters plainly, Thomas ain’t buyin’ it. If Jesus is a Mexican, Thomas is a Missourian. He’s from the Show-Me State.
He was absent at the Lord’s first appearance to His disciples. Thomas has heard their story . . . but he remains unconvinced. He’ll believe the Jesus who died on the cross, who was laid in the tomb, is up and about and making the rounds renewing old acquaintances when he inserts his hand into the hole in the Lord’s side.
And this is precisely what Jesus of Nazareth, Son of God, resurrected Savior and Lord, invites him to do.
And now sounds forth the crescendo of St. John’s gospel in those words that tumble from Thomas’ mouth and rumble through the corridor of time: “My Lord and my God!”
No longer is God an august Personage perched on a cloud, surveying His creation from some remote vantage in the great beyond. He stands before us, bearing the scars of the nails in His hands and feet and of the spear thrust into His side.
Thomas has seen and believed. Such a blessing. But more blessed still are those who believe while yet to see. They will swell the ranks of the brothers and sisters of our Lord, the sons and daughters of our God.
It is here, at the resurrection, that faith is born. If it be not true, Christianity is a cruel hoax. It is here, in the church, that faith is nurtured and love matures. Yes, here, among the misunderstandings and squabbles and hurts and . . . and the trust and the hope and the truth.
Our Lord loves us too much to leave us to our own devices.
Now, one final word about Sagrada Familia, the unfinished church in Barcelona. The second and most famous architect to work on the project, Antoni Gaudi, died in 1926 with the work between 15 and 25 percent complete. He is said to have remarked, “My client is not in a hurry.”
In 2010, the year the pope declared it a minor basilica, 128 years after construction began, the work reached the midpoint. Last month, the current supervising architect declared it 70 percent complete. The current projection calls for the structure to be finished by 2026 with decorative elements wrapped up by 2030 or 2032.
Unless, of course, the Lord returns first. May it be so. Amen.
Sagrada Familia
St. John 20:1-29
In 1992 my old job took me to Barcelona for the Olympic Games. I spent a thoroughly enjoyable three weeks there and, at the end of the games, Marjorie joined me for some vacation time touring Spain.
We began right there in Barcelona, and one of our stops was at the Sagrada Familia, or “Holy Family,” church. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage site and, almost two decades after our visit, Pope Benedict XVI consecrated it and named it a minor basilica. That’s another way of saying it is not a cathedral, for a bishop must sit at a cathedral, and no bishop could or would sit at Sagrada Familia.
And that brings us to the reason for which the church is most famous: Construction began in 1882 and the structure is still not complete. Difficulties with funding proved a drag.
The Spanish Civil War, which broke out in 1936, slowed the work and, worse than that, resulted in considerable damage to the building and destruction of original plans as well as drawings and photographs.
The war eventually ended but the nation has not healed to this day. Spain is a patchwork of provinces and principalities stitched together into a political quilt that has never attained any semblance of unity beyond uneasy and fragile alliances.
In the apartment my colleagues and I rented for the Barcelona Olympics, flags of the Province of Catalonia hung from most of the balconies in the inner courtyard of the building while the Spanish standard was nowhere in sight. In our flat, a sign stuck to the wall over the telephone reminded its usual residents, in the local language, “Speak Catalan Only.”
This sort of assertion of Catalonian defiance of the central government in Madrid appeared everywhere. And in an upside-down, inside-out sort of way, the pieces of the picture – suspicion, mistrust and outright revolution in the nation, fracture and incompletion in the church – seem to fit.
If we take a step back from the traditional perception of the Holy Family as Jesus, Mary and Joseph and project it as the church on earth, what do we find? Dispute, division, even unbridled hostility . . . and most of all impermanence and insecurity.
We ache to be a final unity, one in Jesus Christ our Lord, and yet we know ourselves to be fragmented and far from finished.
Sagrada Familia is a splendid, ragged, hopeful, somewhat architecturally confused edifice, and so, beloved, are we. Jesus Christ, our chief cornerstone, remains resolutely in place; the rest of us are a building that has been going up forever and keeps falling down.
We have arrived at the final sermon in our Trinity season series on the Gospel of St. John. We come today to the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and in this story we find a family that loves passionately, doubts divisively and fears fallibly.
It is a family coming to grips with radically changed relationships. Even way back then, and certainly today, it is flailing to negotiate the path of brotherly love through the chaos of a sin-soaked world.
(Read text.)
Some years ago I had a young Mexican-American friend named Roman who worked in youth ministry. One day, he and I were in a group discussing the resurrection story in St. John’s gospel when Roman startled us all with the declaration, “Jesus was a Mexican.”
Now, a certain amount of pride in one’s people is understandable, even commendable. Wouldn’t the chest of a Swedish Christian, or a Nigerian or a Hungarian, puff up just a bit if he could claim our Lord Christ as one of his own?
Trouble is, any Christian of any race or nationality knows the Bible tells us Jesus was a Palestinian Jew. What could Roman possibly mean by his bold assertion that “Jesus was a Mexican”?
We stared at him for a minute and then I said, “What do you mean Jesus was a Mexican? How could you possibly say a thing like that?”
“It’s obvious,” Roman said nonchalantly, as though he had declared, “Today is Sunday.”
“Mary Magdalene thought He was the gardener. He had to be a Mexican.”
To quote the Scriptures, Jesus wept.
The radically redefined relationships of the resurrection begin long before the resurrection. As with all human relationships, the pattern first appears in the Trinity.
If I told you the Father loves the Son, you would tell me, “Well, duh.” But let’s consider that statement. To begin, Yahweh has only recently become “Father.” In the Old Testament, Yahweh is “God” and “Lord” but He is almost never “Father.”
Where He is, the prophet Isaiah is revealing the Son as the Suffering Servant and the Anointed One – Messiah – who will come to save God’s people. The prophet thus uses “Father” and “Son” to distinguish these two members of the Trinity. But Yahweh is not presented as “Father” to His covenant people.
In the New Testament, everything changes. Over and again, God on high appears as “Father” to His beloved children below. He remains distinct from us – of a different essence; there is no blood tie – but look at what has changed.
God has put on flesh and become a brother to you and to me. And if He is our brother, His Father is our Father. Our relationship to them remains rooted in their relationship to one another.
The Son has gone to the cross and, so doing, He has submitted perfectly to the Father’s will, winning ultimate glory for Himself . . . and subsidiary glory for His brothers and sisters, who now in the resurrection see the door into the holy presence in the divine realm of glory flung wide open.
The resurrection, as one old theologian put it, is God’s “Amen!” to Christ’s “It is finished.”
And so it is, for the risen Son will now ascend to His Father’s side. He will take up His rightful place upon that throne He occupied before the world began, that throne He abandoned for those 33 agonizing years of separation to submit to the Father’s perfect plan for redeeming that wayward race that is mankind.
Walk with me now past the empty tomb and consider the momentous changes in the family of God.
In the other three gospels, multiple women go to the tomb early on Easter morning. In the Fourth Gospel, only Mary Magdalene is mentioned. John probably uses her as a representative of the group. She uses the plural in addressing Peter and John: “we do not know where they have laid Him.”
This Mary, who acquired a tarnished and undeserved reputation in the early days of the church, is the one from who Jesus had cast out seven demons. Like all of the other witnesses of the empty tomb, including the disciples, she fails in the moment to grasp the significance of what her eyes behold.
Two angels in white ask the cause of her tears and she explains that her Lord’s body is missing and she yearns to know where to find it. She turns around and sees Jesus – but fails to recognize Him. He addresses her as “woman” – not as jarring a form of address as it sounds to our ears but neither is it a term of intimacy.
But then Jesus calls her by her name – “Mary!” and she responds instantly, falling to the ground and grasping his feet and crying out, “Rabboni,” which is, translated literally, “my Teacher.”
The gospels give us no other picture so intimate as this one. The Lord triggers her response of worship by using her name.
And we are reminded of what John has told us: "To him the doorkeeper opens, and the sheep hear his voice; and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. And when he brings out his own sheep, he goes before them; and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice” (St. John 10:3-4).
As for Jesus’ perplexing response – “Do not cling to Me, for I have not yet ascended to My Father . . .” – scholars have spilt oceans of ink in an effort to explain it. We will content ourselves with a simple rationale that seems the best: Mary has seized His feet as though to pin Him firmly to the earth and prevent His departure. She is delirious with joy and wants to prolong the moment. Her Lord tells her gently but firmly that His ascension is not happening forthwith.
He will be with them a while longer, and much remains to be done. He dispatches her to inform His disciples that He will indeed soon ascend . . . but He does not use the word “disciples.” Instead, He says, “go to my brothers (ESV).”
What has John reported? He has quoted the Lord: "In My Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also” (St/ John 14:2-3).
His Father’s house will be their house, His brothers’ house.
Mary does not skedaddle to Jesus’ brothers by blood; she understands perfectly that He refers to those who have followed Him in faith. It is these who will take up eternal residence in His Father’s house because in becoming His brothers they have become sons of His Father.
And so He instructs Mary, “. . . say to them, ‘I am ascending to My Father and to your Father, and to My God and to your God.”
In Israel, family relationship passed through the blood, through clearly defined and meticulously documented bloodlines in the nation and in the tribes. In the new dispensation, faith and obedience trump blood.
When the Lord was teaching in a house in a certain village, some reported to Him that His mother and brothers were waiting outside, wishing to see Him. He replied: “My mother and My brothers are these who hear the word of God and do it” (Luke 8:21).
The New Testament enshrines this concept of brotherhood by faith as though it were the very cross of Christ itself. St. Paul tells the Romans: “For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs -- heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together” (8:15-17).
The author of Hebrews, echoing Psalm 22, assures us: “But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, for the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, that He, by the grace of God, might taste death for everyone. For it was fitting for Him, for whom are all things and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings.
“For both He who sanctifies and those who are being sanctified are all of one, for which reason He is not ashamed to call them brethren, saying: ‘I will declare Your name to My brethren; in the midst of the assembly I will sing praise to You.’ And again: ‘I will put My trust in Him.’ And again: ‘Here am I and the children whom God has given Me’” (Psalm 22:9-13).
And so, beloved brothers and sisters, our resurrected Lord has spanned the gulf we dug with the spades of our sin between ourselves and our God. Making us His brothers He has made us His Father’s sons and daughters.
In the crucifixion account preceding this passage, Christ gathered up temporal and spiritual family relations in one bundle. From His cross He looked down upon His mother Mary and, indicating the Apostle John standing beside her, said, “Woman, behold your son!” And to John, “Behold your mother!”
He was binding over responsibility for a widowed woman to a trusted comrade, of course, arranging for Mary to be looked after for the remainder of her days. But on a higher plane Christ was affirming an eternal tie binding a brother of God the Son to the mother of the Son of God.
Now, we must not leave this brief overview of resurrection relations without spending a moment on the one character remaining in this swirling drama of despair and doubt and wonder and awe. I refer, of course, to the apostle sometimes affectionately referred to as “Doubting Thomas.”
We should regard him with some affection, for if we’re honest we must see some of ourselves in him.
To put matters plainly, Thomas ain’t buyin’ it. If Jesus is a Mexican, Thomas is a Missourian. He’s from the Show-Me State.
He was absent at the Lord’s first appearance to His disciples. Thomas has heard their story . . . but he remains unconvinced. He’ll believe the Jesus who died on the cross, who was laid in the tomb, is up and about and making the rounds renewing old acquaintances when he inserts his hand into the hole in the Lord’s side.
And this is precisely what Jesus of Nazareth, Son of God, resurrected Savior and Lord, invites him to do.
And now sounds forth the crescendo of St. John’s gospel in those words that tumble from Thomas’ mouth and rumble through the corridor of time: “My Lord and my God!”
No longer is God an august Personage perched on a cloud, surveying His creation from some remote vantage in the great beyond. He stands before us, bearing the scars of the nails in His hands and feet and of the spear thrust into His side.
Thomas has seen and believed. Such a blessing. But more blessed still are those who believe while yet to see. They will swell the ranks of the brothers and sisters of our Lord, the sons and daughters of our God.
It is here, at the resurrection, that faith is born. If it be not true, Christianity is a cruel hoax. It is here, in the church, that faith is nurtured and love matures. Yes, here, among the misunderstandings and squabbles and hurts and . . . and the trust and the hope and the truth.
Our Lord loves us too much to leave us to our own devices.
Now, one final word about Sagrada Familia, the unfinished church in Barcelona. The second and most famous architect to work on the project, Antoni Gaudi, died in 1926 with the work between 15 and 25 percent complete. He is said to have remarked, “My client is not in a hurry.”
In 2010, the year the pope declared it a minor basilica, 128 years after construction began, the work reached the midpoint. Last month, the current supervising architect declared it 70 percent complete. The current projection calls for the structure to be finished by 2026 with decorative elements wrapped up by 2030 or 2032.
Unless, of course, the Lord returns first. May it be so. Amen.