Sermons from Past Years

The I AM Sayings in John "Metaphor Man" Scott Hoezee

"Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you. What's that you say, Mrs. Robinson? Joltin' Joe has left and gone away." In the wake of the Yankee Clipper's death a couple of weeks ago, many of us have been reminded of these famous lyrics of singer Paul Simon. Originally part of the soundtrack for the film The Graduate, the Simon&Garfunkel song "Mrs. Robinson" has become one of the 1960s' best-known, iconic ballads.

In a 60 Minutes interview a few years back Paul Simon talked a bit about that song. At one point he said that sometime after the song was released, he received a letter from Joe DiMaggio in which DiMaggio expressed his befuddlement at what in the world that song could mean. DiMaggio wrote, "What do you mean 'Where have I gone?' I haven't gone anywhere! I'm still around--I'm selling Mr. Coffee." Then Mr. Simon smiled wryly at Mike Wallace and remarked, "Obviously Mr. DiMaggio is not accustomed to thinking of himself as a metaphor!"

But then, who is? Most, if not all, of us see ourselves as real people with literal, descriptive identities. For instance, I am a pastor, a husband, a father, a committee member, a volunteer, a son--these are all straightforward descriptions of who I am in relation to the people around me in life. Like most of you, I cannot readily conceive of myself as a symbol for something, as a kind of metaphor that represents something beyond myself.

Indeed, if someone came up to you at a party and said, "You are my shelter from the storm's of life," well, you'd be taken aback. Then again, if you met someone who constantly spouted self-referential metaphors, you'd deem that individual a few tomatoes short of a thick sauce. We expect people to denote themselves by saying things like, "I am a plumber" or "I teach school" or "I'm a stay-at-home Dad." But our eyes would widen some if someone said, "I am the oil that lubes my company's machine" or "I am the antibody that shields my family from the viruses of secularism."

This is not a terribly typical mode of discourse--not now and really not in Jesus' day, either. Yet Jesus, according to John's gospel at least, did with some frequency refer to himself in a metaphorical mode. Not surprisingly, he got into trouble and arched many eyebrows each time he did this. Over the course of church history Jesus' famous "I AM" sayings have become the much-loved subject of many beautiful hymns, songs, poems, and stained glass windows--we've seen some of that beauty on display in the music we've heard this very evening. We find these sayings rich in meaning and pastorally comforting. But it was not necessarily that way for the folks who first heard these words.

In fact, if you look at the wider context of the "I AM" sayings in John, you will find that in most cases Jesus' original uttering of these words landed him in swift trouble. After saying, "I am the bread of life," Jesus left most of his disciples scratching their heads, complaining that it was a "hard teaching" that no one could figure out. As a result, that first "I AM" saying caused a good number of Jesus' followers to give up on him. They left!

After saying, "I am the light of the world who illumines all," the Pharisees derided Jesus. They said that Jesus could not illumine anything or anyone and he surely was shedding no light on his own identity. After claiming "I am the good shepherd," the crowds denounced Jesus as a lunatic, saying he was full of a demon and so was "raving mad." And after the most lovely of all the sayings, "I am the resurrection and the life," the case against Jesus was cinched and the chief priests swiftly set into motion the judicial wheels that would shortly get Jesus arrested and executed.

Make your choice, C.S. Lewis once said: embrace Jesus as the God and Lord of your life or squirrel him away with the rest of history's weirdos. But please don't bore the world with all this blather that although not divine or particularly special, Jesus was a very fine ethical teacher who had a striking way with words. Either Jesus really was God in the flesh or he was as loony as a man who walked around claiming to be a poached egg.

Naturally, these days a lot of people do want to say that Jesus was no more than a wandering Galilean cynic sage. He is not who the Apostles' Creed says he is, he's no god. Still, he can be appreciated and studied and to a certain extent even followed simply because now and again he said some really clever things. This is the position of most of the people associated with the Jesus Seminar, and so it's no surprise to consult the Seminar's translation of the New Testament only to find a big footnote dealing with the "I AM" sayings. There the Seminar scholars confidently declare we can be well-assured that these sayings are all fictional creations from the mind of John. Jesus never uttered a one of them.

But those folks must say that or else their idea that Jesus was a good man doesn't work. If Jesus said these things without also being God, then he was not a good man: he was either a devious deceiver or a nut. But down along the ages Christians have believed that Jesus did say these things but that he was neither devious nor insane. Instead, what these sayings teach us is not just that Jesus is God, they also tell us more about who God is.

So many of these metaphors have rich Old Testament echoes: manna in the desert, the original light of creation, God the Shepherd of his sheep Israel, the promise of vines heavy with grapes, the over-arching Old Testament promise of a rich life in a land flowing with the juices and fatness of Eden. Taken together the "I AM" sayings tell us that everything anyone could have ever wanted, every good thing that God has ever promised, is coming to its fullness in Jesus.

But again, that could only be true if Jesus were God. And as many scholars have noted, the sheer number of times that Jesus so emphatically referred to himself as "I am" is itself very likely an echo of God's personal name as he first disclosed it to Moses at the burning bush. "You tell Israel that I AM sent you." As some of you may know, in the Greek language of the New Testament it is not necessary to use personal pronouns. In Greek the verbs are highly inflected--that is, each verb form has its own unique ending which all by itself indicates whether the subject of the verb is "I" or "you" or "we" or "she."

So in much of the New Testament when you read in the English translation a line like, "I say to you" or "I am going over there for a while," in the original Greek you don't actually find the word "I", which in Greek is ego. The personal pronoun is implied by the very conjugation of the verb form. But in the "I AM" sayings Jesus is very emphatic, each time including the ego as a way of saying, "I am" in a way fiercely reminiscent of the name "Yahweh," the great I AM of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Creation, the God of the Exodus, the God who was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.

At the outset this evening we remarked on the difficulty most of us would have thinking of ourselves metaphorically. Jesus did not have that difficulty, not because he was a bit strange but simply because he knew that within himself and within the fullness of the Father and the Holy Spirit there can be found such immense riches, such multi-layered goodness, such galactic power that there is virtually no end to the ways by which Jesus could try to convey all that in ways we could grasp. The shepherding care and love of God, the zestful and effervescent eternal life that bubbles up at the center of God, the life-sustaining nutrients God's Spirit feeds our souls, the creation-affirming energy of God: it was all here on this earth in the person of Jesus from Nazareth.

As we enter this Holy Week, how very grateful we must be that this God came to us in Jesus. For he is studded with all the things we so desperately need in this hurting world of death, disease, decay, loneliness, grief, and strife. We need this metaphor man who is himself no metaphor at all: he really just is the bread to fill our empty and growling souls. He really just is the light that gives us more than a few rays of hope in the valley of death's shadow. He really just is the shepherd who leads us in the way and the truth, giving us the resurrection life whose great gift we celebrate next Sunday.

One day Jesus' friend Martha met Jesus outside her home. Her face was mottled and blotchy from crying, her eyes sagging with bags and bloodshot from so many salty tears. Her chest heaved with the kind of sobs you usually associate with a little child who bumped her head and now can't quite stop crying from the pain and the fright. Into those pathetic, heart-wrenching snuffles Jesus dared to say, "I am the resurrection and the life--do you believe this?" Jesus spoke in a metaphor but Martha answered with the plain, literal truth: "Yes, because you're the Son of God." If this Holy Week has any meaning at all, then that must be our answer, too. Amen.