Labels (John 10:22-30)

Today’s sermon follows a difficult path. If you discover that you can’t travel that path with me, I understand.  I’ve been traveling this path all week in my time of sermon preparation, and I know you have not had that advantage.  But this is where the path has led me, and I feel a need to share it with you.
One day, Jesus went into the temple and began to teach.  His teaching was deep, profound, and full of truth.  And when he encountered someone in need of compassion, he ministered to their needs.
And he said, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and drink this truth.”
But some who heard him, rather than hearing his message and letting it dwell in their hearts – rather than drinking in the truth that Jesus offered – they asked:  “Who is this guy?  Where did he come from?  What are his credentials?”
They only wanted to listen to someone with the right reputation, someone “safe,” someone with their own TV show like Oprah or Dr. Phil, or their own radio program like Rush Limbaugh.  People like that were popular, they were known to everyone, they could be trusted.
But who’s this guy teaching in the temple?  He hadn’t been to school, he hadn’t been on any of the talk shows…
Some said he was a prophet.  Some said he was the messiah.  But others said: “Look at him.  Does he look like a great prophet or mighty messiah?  Look at the clothes he wears.  And listen to his Galilean accent!  The messiah doesn’t come from Galilee.  Nothing good comes from Galilee! Therefore, he must be bad.”
But Jesus said: “I myself am nothing, so don’t worry who I am or where I come from.  I can do nothing on my own.  It’s only what the Father does through me.”
On another occasion, Jesus was accused of being from Samaria, and as everyone knew, all Samaritans were in league with the devil.  That’s what everyone said.  So they said to Jesus: “Come on; you won’t talk about who you are?  Tell us!  Tell us who you are!  Are you a Samaritan?  Are you a demon?  Do you live in a cave full of fire and brimstone, and carry a large red trident, and does steam shoot out of your ears and nostrils?”
There is yet another occasion, the one described in this morning’s scripture reading, which took place on a winter day during the Festival of the Dedication of the Temple.  People gathered around Jesus and said: “Hey!  How long will you keep us guessing?  Tell us who you are.  Tell us where you come from.  Are you the messiah?  Enquiring minds want to know!”
Jesus said:  “Why are you so obsessed with me?  Why are you trying so hard to label me and define me?  Are you trying to contain me, restrict me, limit me, by your definitions of who I am?
“It’s not about the labels.  It’s not about who I am or where I come from.
“It’s about God.
“Know this:  God and I are one.  Look at what I do, and see God.  I’m not trying to get my face on a TV show or magazine cover.  I have no desire to draw attention to myself, except that people may be drawn to God through me.  My life and the things I do point to the Truth, and it is the Truth that matters.”
All three of these episodes are described in the gospel according to John.  They all suggest that Jesus was quite hesitant to allow anyone to apply any kind of label to him, even – and especially – the label, messiah.  Jesus didn’t want it all to be about him.  He wanted it all to be about God.
Plus, he knew that any label or description of who he was would be loaded with preconceived notions, biases, and differences of interpretation.
Similar stories are told of the Buddha.  I read this week in Karen Armstrong’s book Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life that a Brahmin priest found the Buddha sitting under a tree one day, meditating, and was astonished by his strength, serenity, and composure.  The priest wanted to know who he was.  “ ‘Are you a god, sir?’ he asked. ‘Are you an angel … or a spirit?’ No, the Buddha replied… ‘Remember me as one who is awake.’”
In the 18th chapter of John’s gospel, Jesus was again asked about his identity:  “So.  Who are you?  Are you the King of the Jews?”
This time, the question was asked by Pilate, the Roman prefect of Judea, and a strong proponent of the Roman Emperor who considered himself to be the King of the Jews … and king of everyone else, for that matter.
So Pilate asked Jesus, “Are you a king?  Are you the King of the Jews?”
Well, Jesus knew that Pilate’s idea of “king” was different than his own.  Answering either “yes” or “no” would lead to a misperception, a misunderstanding.  It would lead Pilate further away from the truth.
And, as already mentioned, Jesus didn’t want to make this all about him.
So Jesus said:  “Do you ask me this on your own, or did others tell you about me?  Just whose idea of “king” are we talking about here?  Because my kingdom is not from this world.
“Why don’t you just look at my life, my ministry, my works, my legacy… this will testify to the truth.”
I remember a day in seminary, when Gustavo Gutierrez came to visit our campus.  A Dominican priest from Peru, Gustavo Gutierrez is widely regarded as the founder of liberation theology, which seeks to liberate people from unjust economic, social, or political conditions.  
Liberation theology was quite popular among my seminary classmates.  Yet we wondered how long its influence would last.  After a lecture, one seminary student asked Gustavo Gutierrez about this.
I will never forget his answer.  “I was not called and ordained to be a preacher and advocate of liberation theology,” Gutierrez said.  “Liberation theology may die out, and that’s fine.  I was called and ordained to be a preacher of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
It was a little startling to hear the author of a book titled, A Theology of Liberation speak of liberation theology this way.  Yet what he said was true.  Liberation theology was just a label.  To know what it was about, one had to look beyond the label, to what was going on, what was taking place, the life, ministry, works and legacy of those who were its strongest advocates … and hopefully what you would see would be consistent with the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Hopefully what you would see would point beyond the label, to the core truth of scripture, the core teaching, which is, of course, to show love and compassion to one’s neighbor.
Some of my favorite movies are those where the lines between the good guys and the bad guys are blurred, where the labels disappear; movies in which every person wrestles with the good and the bad within.  
One that I saw with my kids when they were little is the Disney movie Brother Bear.  At the time Disney had a pretty good formula for its movies, which almost always involved a bad guy who must be defeated.  Think of Gaston; Jafar; Judge Claude Frollo; or Scar. It was really easy to assign them labels.  They were bad.
But then came Brother Bear.  A Disney movie without a villain.  People seeking to apply labels would have a hard time here.  Who is the hero?  Who is the villain?  Instead of answering that question, Brother Bear forces you to realize that every person has both good and bad within them, and the potential to become either a kind friend, or a monster.
Another movie that does the same thing is the movie Life of Pi.  In the book on which the movie is based, Pi describes the zoo in which he was raised:  “Just beyond the ticket booth Father had painted on a wall in bright red letters the question: DO YOU KNOW WHICH IS THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL IN THE ZOO? An arrow pointed to a small curtain.  There were so many eager, curious hands that pulled at the curtain that we had to replace it regularly.  Behind it was a mirror.”
That scene is not in the movie, but a similar one is.  In the movie, Pi tries to get close to the zoo’s new tiger.  According to Pi’s father, the tiger is an animal, an unthinking, uncaring beast, capable of dangerous ferocity.  Pi argues, “Animals have souls – I have seen it in their eyes.”
Pi’s father then says, “The tiger is not your friend.  When you look into its eyes, you see only your own emotions reflected back at you.”
And for the rest of the movie, what Pi’s father says is true:  Pi sees his own emotions, his own self, reflected back at him in the eyes of the tiger.  But the question is: Is the reflection of himself that he sees good or evil?
Every human has the potential to be dangerous, to inflict harm and evil on others.  We’ve seen that human capacity for evil this week.  I saw this picture of the eight year-old who was killed Monday in Boston, and it broke my heart.  Several others were killed, and nearly 200 were injured.  Thinking about those who did this, I couldn’t believe that anyone could have so little regard for human life.  How could they be so evil?
When events like the bombing in Boston take place, we sooo want to find labels to apply to people.  We want to know:  Who did this?  Who are they?  Where did they come from?  We want an explanation for this evil that has taken place.  We want to look into its face, and see how ugly it is, how unlike us it is; we become so eager to define ourselves as good, to separate us from them, the ones who are so evil.
We don’t want to be reminded that the labels that we use to separate us from them can be deceiving.  I certainly didn’t want to be reminded, this week, by several well-intentioned facebook friends, who, in effect, forced me to look into the eyes of the tiger, and see my own reflection.  They showed me the names of 175 children killed by U.S. military drones; innocent victims of an ongoing war.
The check I mailed to the U.S. government last Monday paid for their deaths.
But, as soon as my thoughts were pulled in this direction, another facebook friend reminded me that my check to the government also helped pay for the uniformed first responders who courageously and compassionately rushed to care of the victims of the bombing in Boston.  And so my check represents what is true on a larger scale, that every human is capable of both cruelty and compassion.
In the movie Brother Bear, Kenai is a boy on the verge of manhood … and he’s just about had it with bears.  They get into his village’s food supply, they attack without warning; they’re monsters.  They’re cruel.
Kenai felt that it was up to him to rid his village of this menace – one bear in particular – and he goes off to fight and kill the bear.
But then, against his will, he himself is transformed into a bear.  Even so, it takes him awhile to discover that bears really aren’t as he had labeled them; they really aren’t the monsters he made them out to be.  It takes him even longer to realize that the monster he had been fighting against for so long existed within himself.
It is a difficult lesson, and learning this lesson involves much pain and sadness.  Letting go of labels, casting aside prejudices, and seeing things as they really are is never easy.
But it is the path to love, to understanding, to compassion.  To peace.
And it starts with something that, at times, is very difficult to do: seeing the world through someone else’s eyes.  Seeing the world through the eyes of your enemy.
There is, in the Bible, a similar story about two brothers.  Twins, actually, who were born hating each other.
Their names were Jacob and Esau.  Esau was born first, but Jacob was clever, and deceived his father into giving him all the rights and blessings of the first born son.  Obviously, this did not make Esau happy.  His anger grew, and Jacob had to flee for his life.
For years, Jacob lived far away from Esau.  He thought he had left Esau behind forever, and had moved on in his life.  But this is where I must mention that, in the ancient stories, it is common for twins to represent two parts of one whole, two parts of one body.  What Jacob hated in Esau was really a part of himself; and what Esau hated in Jacob was also a part of himself.  Looking into each other’s eyes was like looking into the eyes of the tiger; what they saw were their own emotions reflected back at them.  Thus the battle between Jacob and Esau is the battle that takes place within a person who is not whole.
To find wholeness, Jacob had to be reunited and reconciled with his brother.  Jacob had to confront the darkness within himself that his twin brother represented.  Jacob knew that if he didn’t make peace with Esau, then Esau – that is, Jacob’s own dark side – would eventually get the best of him.
Jacob’s journey toward reconciliation began with a wrestling match, but it ended with peace.  Jacob and Esau met, and when they looked into each other’s eyes, they saw the goodness that was there.  Esau even said to Jacob, “Seeing your face is like seeing the face of God.”
In that moment of reconciliation, Jacob had learned to control the darkness within himself, which is always an essential step on the journey toward peace.
In the same way, Kenai in Brother Bear saw the darkness which he had projected onto his enemy in himself.
In the same way, Pi was able to find a way to live peacefully with the tiger who was a reflection of his own emotions.
Who’s good?  Who’s bad?  Who’s evil?  Who’s righteous?
In moments like these, when we want so desperately to distance ourselves from those who have committed such evil acts, questions like these are challenging.  Seeing something in ourselves that is capable of even a tiny fraction of the evil we saw on the news this week is a tough pill to swallow.
And yet, every hateful word we speak, every prejudiced thought we think, draws upon the same evil the world witnesses in acts of terror, differing only in scale.
Until we stop throwing labels around and start recognizing the common humanity that all people share, we will never have peace in our world.  Karen Armstrong, in her book Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, wrote that “We cannot reasonably expect the leaders of our own or other people’s nations to adopt more humane policies if we ourselves continue to live egotistically, unkindly, and greedily, and give free rein to unexamined prejudices.  We cannot demand that our enemies become more tolerant and less violent if we make no effort to transcend the [primitive, self-centered motivations] in our own lives.  We have a natural capacity for compassion as well as for cruelty.  The choice is ours.”