The Invitation - the Challenge - of the Beloved Disciple

Sermon. St Mary’s, Little Ilford (live-stream only). 27.12.20

St John the Evangelist

John 21.19b-end

 

Have you ever had a conversation with a hermit?

 

It’s a serious question. I am not pretending for one minute that John the Evangelist was a hermit. I am taking us round the houses. I admit that. But bear with me.

 

So I ask again: have you ever had a conversation with a hermit? You may well say: Of course not. Hermits live in solitude. They don’t have conversations. Well, I say: that is half right.

 

It is right that hermits don’t do conversations in the sense of chatting, gossiping, debating, or small talk. There’s no point inviting a hermit to your dinner party. It is also right that hermits choose silence, a great deal of silence. They are at ease with stillness and silence. They pray, out loud at times, speaking words at times, but the words of prayer are set in the context of silence, in a sea of silence, in an ocean of silence.

 

But! But that does not mean that hermits do not have to do with people. Hermits do talk. People visit hermits, and hermits are up to being visited. Hermits have not so much cut themselves off from people as cut themselves off from what get called “civilisation”, and all the comforts and pointers of what is considered a “normal” life. You know: job, career, partner, children, status in the community. All of those perfectly natural – and intrinsically good – markers of identity. A hermit is one who is, as it were, an embodied experiment in what it might be to be a human being, when all the ways human beings “fit in” are taken away.

 

I used to visit a monk in the Lowlands of Scotland. (I have mentioned him before – Brother Roland Walls of Blessed and Righteous Memory.) He himself was not a hermit (we’re still around the houses). He lived in community. But, to be fair, the community was often a community of two. So we might perhaps think of him as a “semi-detached hermit”. He’d taken a vow of poverty, but someone gave him some money as a gift. He immediately made mental plans to spend a fortnight in Lanzarote or somewhere like that. But then he felt called to go and visit a hermit (a particular hermit he’d heard of), as hermits are, as I say, up for being visited.

 

It is not that easy to visit a hermit of course. Living away from civilisation, they can take some tracking down. It can take an arduous journey to get to them. In other words, it takes a pilgrimage. And it’s a pilgrimage which has a definite goal, a definite end. On meeting the hermit, the pilgrim makes a particular request. They say: “Speak to me a word, Father, that I may live.” “Speak to me a word, Mother, that I may live.” It’s as solemn and as straightforward as that.

 

Typically the word that the hermit gives is simple. They may say: “Pray constantly.” “Weep for your sins.” “Love your enemies”. Sayings like that. The pilgrim may even feel cheated. They wanted someone to reflect their life-story back to the them, and instead what they get are pithy sayings that they might as easily get by opening the Bible at random. But of course this word is deceptively simple. The hermit distils what the pilgrim most needs to hear.

 

I told you I was taking you round the houses. Thank you for indulging me (not that I gave you a choice). But all is now set for the point. The point is that when Brother Roland met the hermit he did indeed say: “Speak to me a word, Father, that I may live.” And the hermit responded with this (and only this – this was it): “St John was so close to our Lord he could hear his heart beat.”

 

”St John was so close to our Lord he could hear his heart beat.”

 

I imagine you’ll get the reference. Indeed, as we have just been reminded, in John’s Gospel, when Jesus reclines for his last meal (not a Passover meal in John, by the way), the Beloved Disciple, whom we call John, was next to him. Here’s a rather literal translation of the Greek [John 13.23]: “There was, reclining, one of his disciples in the bosom of Jesus, the one whom Jesus loved.” [En anakeimanos heis ek ton matheton autou en to kolpo tou Iesou, hon egapa ho Iesous.] Yes, it is as close as that, as intimate as that.

 

If we remember this detail, we are unlikely to consider it important. But now we have heard the life-giving word of the hermit, we are encouraged to pay attention.

 

”St John was so close to our Lord he could hear his heart beat.” This is to say: extremely close. About as close as you can get. I think there is something here for us, something somewhere between an invitation and a challenge.

 

I said on Christmas Day that preachers often preach on Love – so often that the words become too familiar. We expect them. They wash over us. We are of course at heart glad that the words of love are there. We hear that Gd loves us. We know that Gd loves us. But these words don’t cut through. It is, bluntly, hard for us to listen to the love-song Gd is singing, as it’s commented on so repetitively, and perhaps so unimaginatively.

 

Well today I’d like to speak of the love of Gd in a different way. Not, for once, Gd love for us, but our love for Gd. Our love for Gd in Christ. Our love for Christ. Dare we… no, really, dare we place ourselves in the bosom of Jesus?

 

I want to suggest that two things are true:

1.     It is true that our love for Gd and Christ is an organic response to our sense of Gd’s and Christ’s love for us, and

2.     It is just as true that our love for Gd and Christ is a task we are called to.

There is no technique that brings about love for Gd and Christ. It is not something than can be taught as things are taught. But the solemn invitation or command can still be delivered: find your way of loving Christ. Loving Christ intimately. Nurture it. Nurture it always. Place yourself, over and over, in the bosom of Jesus. Be so close to our Lord that you can hear his heart beat.

 

We have heard that John’s Gospel ends by owning that “there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” Most assuredly we can say that there are many other things that can be said about John, the Evangelist, the Evangelist of Gd as Love, the Beloved Disciple. Fear not: I do not propose to attempt to list them.

 

I return to the heart of John’s message, yes, to its heart-beat. For he was close to our Lord’s that he could hear his heart beat. Into this place we are invited, and the invitation stands, in season and out of season. It will not be withdrawn. Let us make it our own.

 

Blessed Feast Day. Amen.