Lectionary Commentaries for April 28, 2024
Fifth Sunday of Easter

The next two Sundays of Easter take us into the middle of the Farewell Discourse in John’s Gospel. Chapter 13 narrates the “sign” that sets in motion the hour and Jesus’ farewell. The Farewell Discourse begins at 14:1, interpreting both the foot washing and the events to come, for Jesus and for his disciples. 

The fifth through seventh Sundays of Easter in the Revised Common Lectionary are always from these chapters in John, with the seventh Sunday dedicated to the High Priestly Prayer (John 17). For our purposes here, the fifth and sixth Sundays in Year B are devoted to the first 17 verses of chapter 15, the extended metaphor of the vine and the branches, so it is incumbent upon the preacher to look ahead and determine on what to focus for each Sunday. 

It is a unique homiletical challenge that in the Easter preaching season, we revert to the last night Jesus spent with his disciples before his arrest, trial, crucifixion, and resurrection. Yet, bringing Jesus’ last words forward into the Easter season is worth the homiletical effort. The resurrection appearances are all the more incredible when we realize that in Jesus’ resurrection, all of his promises of chapters 13–17 are fulfilled—and abundantly so. 

The Farewell Discourse is Jesus at his pastoral best. Chapter 14 begins with the well-known assurance of Jesus preparing a place for the disciples (14:1–2) and the first mention and promise of the Paraclete (14:15–17). The metaphor of the vine and the branches introduces a new image through which the disciples might view their relationship with Jesus, especially anticipating his impending absence. “I am the vine” is the last “I AM” statement with a predicate nominative. 

The “I AM” declarations are unique to John’s Gospel and occur in two forms: the “I AM” statements with a predicate nominative, and the absolute “I AM” statements by which Jesus reveals his true identity as God incarnated (4:26; 6:20; 8:24, 28, 58; 13:19; 18:5, 7). Given the location of this last predicate nominative “I AM” statement in the Farewell Discourse, all of the previous predicate nominative “I AM” statements stand behind “I AM the vine” (6:35, 51; 8:12; 9:5; 10:7, 9, 11, 14; 11:25–26; 14:6; 15:1, 5). 

Jesus has loved his disciples to the end (13:1) with what he has provided for them throughout their time together. A preacher might rehearse the abundance of pledges from Jesus that reach their fullness in “I AM the vine.” Jesus is the bread of life, the light of the world, the living water, and so on. How do these predicate nominative “I AM” statements resonate here and now in Jesus’ parting statements? 

Jesus first establishes the metaphor as that which encapsulates the relationship between him and the Father, before turning to the implications for the disciples. Critical for interpreting all of the images/metaphors in the Gospel of John is to recognize that they are fundamentally revelations of Jesus’ identity and the abundant life he both offers and provides (10:10). 

The metaphor communicates mutual dependence, provision, union, and sustenance and recalls the relationship between Jesus and the Father established in the prologue to the Gospel (1:18). One of the primary claims of the Fourth Gospel is to assure believers that in their believing, they share in the relationship between Jesus and the Father now and always. 

This is made clear when Jesus says to the disciples, “You are the branches.” This is the only predicate nominative “I AM” with a “YOU ARE.” After hearing Jesus’ distressing words just prior to this—“Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid” (14:27); “I am going to the Father” (14:28); “I will no longer talk much with you” (14:30)—the disciples need to hear reassuring words. Jesus’ statement is not “You have been” or “You will be,” but “You are the branches,” and this present-tense promise is the peace needed for troubled hearts. 

Jesus confirms the identity of the disciples when discipleship itself, because of the betrayal of Judas (13:30) and the foretelling of Peter’s denial (13:36–38), is uncertain. “I AM the vine, you are the branches” is both promise and possibility. In the midst of sorrow and loss, it is often hard to look ahead much farther than the next minute, but “You are the branches” sets in motion the disciples’ purpose. 

While the branches cannot live without the vine, the vine doesn’t have much to give without the branches. This mutual need between Jesus and his disciples is an often-overlooked component of discipleship in the Gospel of John. Yet, without the disciples, the fulfillment of John 3:16 cannot come to bear and Jesus’ commission to the disciples, “As the Father has sent me so I send you” (20:21), is a vacuous directive. How can God love the world without them? Without us? 

We see reciprocal need first in the relationship between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. Yes, she needs him, the living water, but he needs her, first for a drink in the middle of a warm spring day, but then to be the testifier to her village people. 

Locating “I AM the vine” in the Farewell Discourse prevents homiletical musings that might take a preacher down horticultural rabbit holes. Any explanation of vines and branches needs to ask the question, “What difference does this image make as the last ‘I AM’ revelation from Jesus?”  Considering how the disciples would experience Jesus’ words here affords our interpretations the pastoral heart intended. 

The three preceding lectionary texts from Acts have focused on the extraordinary effects of the risen Christ on the believing community in Jerusalem. In Christ’s name, not by their “own piety or power,” the apostles Peter and John enable a paralyzed man to walk (3:12‒19; 4:5‒12), and the fledgling congregation pools its properties and possessions to take care of needy members (4:32‒35). 

But all is not bliss. Internally, a married couple drop dead after lying to the assembly about their financial affairs (5:1‒11), and a Greek-speaking group complains that their widows are not receiving adequate provisions (6:1‒7). Externally, the priestly authorities seize and censure the apostles for proclaiming the risen Christ (4:1‒22; 5:17‒40), and a young zealot named Saul launches a reign of terror against Christ’s followers, resulting in the execution of Stephen (one of seven “deacons” elected to oversee food distribution) and dispersion of many Christ-believers from Jerusalem (6:3‒6; 7:54‒8:3). 

In this precarious environment, Philip, another of the seven table-ministers (6:5) emerges as the first “evangelist” to preach the gospel outside Jerusalem and Judea, beginning in bordering Samaria, which is occupied by people with a history of ethnic-religious conflict with Jerusalem-oriented Jews (8:4‒13; see also 21:8). Philip enjoys great success as a large number of urban Samaritans believe his message and are baptized in Christ’s name.

But soon Philip’s evangelistic career takes a strange turn, as “an angel of the Lord” suddenly dispatches him to the isolated “wilderness/desert road” running from Jerusalem to Gaza. Philip thus heads “toward the south” (more precisely, southwest) from Samaria (8:26). But the “south” term (mesēmbria) used here can also mean “noon” (see 22:6), doubling as a spatial and temporal marker. Thus, Philip the evangelist heads to a desert road in the noontime heat—a place and time he is least likely to encounter anyone to preach to!

It only gets stranger as a strange character rolls by. Actually, “races” by would be more accurate as the traveler cruises along in a chariot, requiring Philip to “[run] up to it” and “join it” (8:29‒30). This passenger is the chief treasury officer to “the Candace, the queen of the Ethiopians” (8:27), which explains his fancy ride. But what is he doing on this Jerusalem-Gaza roadway? He’s heading home to Ethiopia (ancient Nubia, south of Egypt) but not from a diplomatic mission. Rather, he had visited Jerusalem on a religious pilgrimage to worship Israel’s God. He had also procured a scroll of Isaiah, a valuable document not widely available, which he happens to be reading when Philip approaches (8:27‒30).

So midday in the middle of the Gaza desert, Philip encounters a wealthy, chariot-riding, God-fearing, Bible-reading African official. Just another day in the life of a Christ evangelist—with another wrinkle that’s really the main feature. This fascinating, multifaceted figure is also a eunuch, and it is this sexual characteristic that most defines him in Acts’ story. He is first introduced as “a man, an Ethiopian eunuch” (my translation). Leading with “man”—anēr/“male” (glossed over in New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition)—is ironic, if not sardonic: by social definition, a eunuch is no-man, no real man, no whole man. Though enjoying advantages befitting his high economic and political status, his eunuch condition marks him as deviant in “normal” society. After his fuller introduction, the narrative only identifies him as “the eunuch” (ho eunouchos, 8:34, 36, 38, 39).  

If his main identity is “the eunuch,” his main activity is “reading the prophet Isaiah” (8:28). This is what first catches Philip’s ear when he catches up to the chariot. Philip hears the eunuch reading Isaiah aloud (a servant would be driving while he reads) and asks him, “Do you understand what you are reading?” (8:30). That is the central question, and Philip’s core mission is to help this religious seeker—whatever his other identities (Philip never mentions them)—understand the scripture he’s reading. A clever play on the word ginōskō (“know”) reinforces this aim—ginōskeis ha anaginōskeis (8:30)—which we might render, “Do you know what you’re seeking to know by reading?” or “Do you realize what you’re reading?”

The eunuch is not just reading any random Isaiah text when Philip arrives. It’s an evocative passage about a shorn, scorned, shamed sheep-like figure to whom “justice” and “generation” (or “offspring,” genea) were denied (Isaiah 53:7‒8 // Acts 8:32‒33). The eunuch specifically wants to know, “About whom … does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” (8:34). 

This is intensely personal for the man as a eunuch. Again, whatever benefits he has in the Candace’s court, he suffers widespread stigmatization in Gentile and Jewish society as a permanently emasculated, mutilated figure unable to procreate—in short, a threatening sexual anomaly. More particular to his religious interests, he remains “cut off” by law from full participation in the covenant community, according to Deuteronomy 23:1—unless Isaiah offers a glimmer of good news; unless there’s some way to “describe” a more positive outcome for the shorn and slain sufferer’s “generation” and “life” (Isaiah 53:8 // Acts 8:33).

Philip the evangelist comes at the right time and place (orchestrated by the Spirit), and “starting with this [Isaiah] scripture he proclaimed to him the good news [euēngelisato] about Jesus” (8:35). Acts provides no transcript of Philip’s sermon, but we readily imagine his identification of the unjustly crucified Jesus with Isaiah’s innocent slain figure. 

This Jesus, God’s Son and Messiah, suffered in sympathetic solidarity with all victims of violence and stigmatization, like Isaiah’s slaughtered lamb—and the Ethiopian eunuch. And the best news is that “his life [was] taken away from the earth” (Isaiah 53:8 // Acts 8:33) in resurrection and exaltation by God, thus opening the household of God for faithful sufferers—including eunuchs, foreigners, and other “outcasts”—just as Isaiah announced a little later in his scroll (56:3‒8)! 

The prophet Isaiah and Jesus Messiah revise Deuteronomic law to better reflect the inclusive thrust of God’s covenant to bless all peoples, families, and persons on the earth (see Genesis 12:1‒3; 22:17‒18).

The Ethiopian eunuch readily grasps the point and moves to act: “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” (8:36). How about that—water in the desert at the optimal evangelistic moment! With barriers blocking fellowships broken down, nothing “prevents” Philip and the eunuch entering the baptismal waters together and emerging as full brothers in Christ in God’s family.   

How odd is it, during Easter, to return to the Psalm of Good Friday, the chilling scream of the crucifixion?¹

We would prefer to move on, to get over it, to sound the resurrection trumpet and roll the stone back to erase the unhappy memory of Good Friday.

But the crucifixion is always the Gospel. You can’t get to Easter without Good Friday, and the resurrected Jesus still bears the wounds in his hands and side (John 20:27). The triumphant hymn by Matthew Bridges proclaims the eternal union of not just the Psalm but the salvific act in Christ: “Crown him the Lord of love; behold his hands and side, rich wounds, yet visible above, in beauty glorified.”²

And the fact is, Jesus the Messiah came, but the messianic era has not exactly dawned. The ache persists, sin grows like kudzu, and we still cry out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1).

Much has been written about the need for the church to recover the “lament.” We have forgotten how to lay our sorrows down before the Lord—or have we? Perhaps too many of our prayers are half-hearted laments; we plead to God for help and express our discomforts. What we then do not have is patience.

We lack an understanding that in this realm, on this side of eternity, God does not swiftly reply, righting all wrongs and smoothing our paths.  We want to piece together a brief lament, a quick prayer request, even strengthened by a prayer chain from friends—and God should intervene now and give us what we ask for.  We would really prefer to skip right over the lament, but God lets us stay with the pain; God invites us to meet God in the darkness.

Evocative Images
The Psalms are indeed, as Christoph Barth put it, a “School of Prayer.” They are not a primer in how to make your prayers effective but a lesson in how to find God and live in union with God. Psalm 22 illustrates the wide range of emotions, yearnings, and destinies in our life with God. If we read past its rightly famous first verse, we are jostled by the rich language of the psalm and the grand reversal that arrives late in the day but just in time.

In Preaching the Psalms, Clint McCann and I recommend two approaches to preaching a psalm.³

First, one can explore an image, which is not taken literally, but fruitfully probed as evocative. Or second, one can explore the movement within the psalm, a shift in the mood of the one praying. In Psalm 22, both approaches are fruitful.

The images are startling and hyperbolic. Graphically and poetically, they elicit a deep emotional resonance within us. The psalmist moves from a child on its mother’s breast to being surrounded by bulls, from being poured out like water to feeling like hot wax, from a broken old piece of pottery to growling dogs.

In addition, we not only preach the images of the psalm; we might imitate the psalmist and deploy a few imaginative metaphors ourselves.

From Lament to Praise
Like most psalms, the 22nd is not a still life, portraying only the agony of an ancient psalmist or Christ breathing his last. Instead, the psalm exhibits a drama, an inner movement that transports the reader to a new place, an unanticipated destination. The reader is taken on a pilgrimage from sorrow to joy, from desolation to hope, from cross to glory.

Psalm 22 is a lament, and like virtually all laments, there is an inevitable miracle of grace, a mind-boggling shift from lament to praise.

Here we see that the lament is not about me expressing my inner angst or pouring out my soul. Rather, the lament is about God, who knows my grief but does not leave me alone and perhaps even joins me in the pit. God lifts the poor from the ash heap. Indeed, God feeds the poor, and with an explosion of scope, all nations come around to worshipping God!

When Jesus, in his hour of dereliction, recalled the 22nd Psalm, was it simply to utter the cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Had he not memorized the entire psalm, as good Jewish boys would?

Did he, even on the cross, fast-forward in his mind to that turn to praise, the dawn of the new day pledged in its closing verses, which we read now, appropriately, during Easter?

The praise and hope in the face of darkness is no utopian fantasy. What the psalm voices will happen! And it will happen because of the cry at the beginning of the psalm.

Once Christ was forsaken, we never will be. God’s plan for humanity, for the very earth itself and the universe, will be fulfilled because God forsook Jesus and let him suffer in order to embody the wondrous love of God. So great was that victory hinted at in Psalm 22, even those “who sleep in the earth” shall bow down! Perhaps Paul had this psalm in mind when he languished in prison, bearing much physical pain, and spoke of Christ emptying himself, humbling himself, obedient unto death on a cross (cf. Philippians 2:7-11).

Notice that the raging “Why?” is never fully answered. Our query “Why do bad things happen?” is not resolved. But we hope. For we have sung the psalm with God’s people, who have borne every conceivable agony over countless centuries. And we find ourselves carried forward on the tide of their faith, on the surging wave of the powerful grace of God.

Notes

1. Commentary first published on this website May 10, 2009.
2. “Crown Him with Many Crowns,” in Evangelical Lutheran Worship (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2006), #855, verse 3.
3. James C. Howell and J. Clinton McCann Jr., Preaching the Psalms (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001).

Today’s passage contains some of the most moving and profound teachings on love in the New Testament. The depth and power of the three words “God is love” are often lost on us because of the abundance of contradicting conceptions of love all around us. We tend to make gods out of love and equate all love with God.

First John, however, speaks of love in a specific, distinctly Christian way. Love is not God, but God is love, meaning that believers are to understand love on God’s terms and according to God’s character. The author intertwines theology and ethics in such a way that he describes Christian confession as inextricable from Christian conduct. Those who know God show God through their love for others. Divine love manifested most perfectly through the love of God in Christ is a reality that God desires us to know, see, inhabit, and share.

To appreciate the flow of 1 John 4:7–21, it is helpful to follow the passage’s three movements that focus on the source of perfect love (4:7–10), the experience of perfect love (4:11–16a), and the confidence of perfect love (4:16b–21).¹

The source of perfect love

The author connects being “born of God” with knowing God’s character in 4:7. God’s children have an intimate relationship with God and thus are deeply acquainted with God’s love. In saying that “everyone who loves is born of God and knows God,” the author implies that God’s children cannot help but love because they are so intimately in fellowship with God.

However, the author’s use of the first-person plural subjunctive “let us love,” along with his repeated exhortations to love throughout the letter, suggests that the struggle to love is real. Rather than rebuke his audience, however, 1 John directs their attention to the source of love to encourage them to be conduits of God’s love to others in the community.

In 4:8, the author again connects knowing God with loving others but this time in the negative: “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love” (see 3:10). To know God is to know something of God’s character. That “God is love” means that everything God does emanates from his loving nature. Love, while not an exhaustive description of God, is a defining characteristic. People can be described as loving, but only God can be equated with love.

Divine love is not obscure or abstract but has a special and specific meaning and expression. God defined and demonstrated his perfect love when he “sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him” (4:9; 3:16). In 4:10, “only Son” (monogenēs) emphasizes Christ’s unparalleled uniqueness both in his nature and in the life-giving impact of his atoning death for us (see also John 1:1; 3:16; 17:3).

The author of 1 John emphasizes the initiative of God’s love when he says, “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us” (4:10). The prepositional phrase “in this” refers to the revelation of God’s love in the life and death of Jesus Christ. Our love for God is not the condition or basis for God’s love for us (“not that we loved God”), nor do our actions make us right with God. Only “Jesus Christ the righteous” (2:1) could demonstrate God’s love so palpably and perfectly on the cross.

Thus, our love for others demonstrates our fitting and grateful response to God’s immeasurable love for us: “Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another” (4:11).

The experience of perfect love

The phrase “since God loved us so much” in 4:11 resumes the emphasis in 4:7 and marks a transition between 4:7–11 and 4:12–16a by explaining not why we “ought to love” but how we experience God’s perfect love. Christ’s incarnation and death have revealed that God is love and made it possible for those redeemed by God’s love in Christ to love one another.

However, we still cannot see God because only Jesus the Son has seen the Father (4:12; see also John 1:18; 5:37; 6:46). There will be a day when “we will see him as he is” (3:2). But until then, the invisible God makes himself visible in Christian love. When we love in response to God’s love for us, “his love is perfected in us” (4:12).

As a struggling perfectionist myself, I find this idea that God’s love is made perfect in us somewhat perplexing. What does it mean that God’s love is perfected in us? It does not mean that Christians love perfectly, since the author tells us that “God abides in those who confess (homologeō) that Jesus is the Son of God” (4:15). When we confess the truth about Jesus, who is “faithful and just,” we also confess (homologeō) the truth about ourselves: that we need Jesus to “forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1:9).

When God perfects his love in us, it means that God’s intended purpose for loving us is fulfilled when we extend the love to others. The use of the prepositional phrase en hēmin (“in us”) in 4:9 is significant because it emphasizes how God reveals his love not only “for us” by sending his Son, but also “in us” by giving us his Spirit (see also 3:24; 4:12, 13). The Spirit makes it possible for God to inhabit us, and for us to inhabit God. Also, the Spirit only confesses the truth about God (4:2; 5:6) and thus empowers us to integrate our christological confession “that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world” (4:14) with our loving conduct done in Christ’s name (3:23).

The confidence of perfect love

In 4:16b–21, the author brings to a climax his teaching on the source, nature, and purpose of love. God is love, and everything God does is an expression of his perfect, unconditional love. We do not have to love perfectly for God’s love to be perfected in us. Interpersonal acts and expressions of love arise out of God’s perfect love revealed in Jesus. The telos or goal of love is that all life should flourish (1 John 4:9; John 15:9–16). God’s perfect love dwells in our midst! Christian reality is defined by this love and characterized by life-giving relationships centered on the confession of Christ as “Savior of the world” (4:15; John 4:42) and expressed “in truth and action” (3:18).

God’s love achieves its goal also by producing confidence in us on the day of judgment (4:17; see 2:28–3:3). Popular notions of love resist accepting the idea that love involves demands, consequences, and judgments. But for 1 John, to say “God is love” (4:16b) also means that God’s judging activity arises from his loving nature.

God’s perfecting love helps us love one another despite our sinful nature, so we need not be afraid to love, however imperfectly. By showing up again and again to love our brothers and sisters in Christ, we demonstrate that God is inhabiting us in such a way that his way of love becomes our habitus, or our internalized second nature—something we were born of God to do.

While 1 John’s focus is not on loving those outside the Christian community, his logic flows from the same source. How can we say we love the God who “so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (John 3:16) if we do not love our brothers and sisters dwelling right in our midst? We cannot. But we can continue to love one another in messy ways, confident that our actions speak louder than words and find their source in the inexhaustible, perfect love of God.

Notes

1. R. Alan Culpepper, The Gospel and the Letters of John, IBT (Nashville: Abington, 1998), 269.