“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation…
But the reason I am going to read it is for us to hear the grief underneath the words. Abraham Lincoln penned these words and read them at a dedication of the first monument on the battlefield at Gettysburg.
The Civil War was far from over – we know now that Gettysburg turned the tide but they did not know then how the war would end or when. The nation was in grief in all directions – north, south, east, and west. Hundreds of thousands of Americans had died. Grief was carried in the blood of the living like sap runs in the veins of a maple.
So instead of hearing a distant, historic speech listens for the grief wedged around each word like mortar around brick.
Listen to the deep sorrow, and imagine the anxiety of unknown endings. Imagine Abe Lincoln staring down a dark tunnel hoping there would be light at the other end, but walking nonetheless in the dark, entering it without knowing if he or the nation would reach light. Lincoln’s dedication is surprisingly brief.
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather,
to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated
to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Can you hear the solemn, grave tone in that last line: That this government by the people may not perish? It is not a forgone conclusion. That the dead will be remembered, and that their lives will not have been in vain, is a hope struggling to be born but not a sure thing. That the place they stood bore unspeakable suffering is held in Lincoln’s arms like a dying child, but that it would be the place from which hope blooms was uncertain.
Okay, so why the Gettysburg Address? As an example that leads us back to the Gospel.
Because all history, all speeches, all words have a context. Everything we bother to harbor as a communal memory was sculpted by the moments
that surrounded it. Hearing the ghostly whispers surrounding such speeches enables us to understand them a little, just a little, beyond our own self-defining moment.
The Gospel of John is full of such speeches. They are not Jesus’ speeches, by the way. John’s Gospel is full of speeches that John wrote and placed upon the lips of Jesus. In the same way that Lincoln, four and a half months after the battle ascribed motives and inspiration to the dead, John, seventy years after Jesus, ascribes words and meaning to the dead messiah.
So I will read a few lines from John that we just heard, only this time I ask us to listen for the fear, the anxiety, and the rage of the hunted.
John is writing from inside a fractured, fragile moment.
The followers of Jesus had been expelled from the synagogue because Judaism reorganized (Jamnia) in an effort to define itself in the aftermath of the Jewish-Roman war, which had reduced it to a diaspora without a geographical place or center. Being displaced from the synagogue also meant losing the protected legal Jews had to practice their religion outside the bounds of the authorized Roman religion. Persecution and Christian vulnerability can be heard in John.
In fact, for John there is little hope that the beast of Roman domination will end – the hope is rather in the meaning of their suffering. Just as Lincoln could not remove the grief of the living for the tragic loss of the dead, John could not remove the obvious terror of the moment: both were limited to giving the moment meaning beyond itself.
Sometimes, often in fact, that is the only authentic power we possess: Giving meaning to the moment even when the moment is cruel.
Listen then, to John and hear the angels of light and dark fluttering in and through his words like a hummingbird in search of nectar.
“…For God so loved the world
that he gave his only Son,
so that everyone who believes in him
may not perish
but may have eternal life.
Indeed, God did not send
the Son into the world to condemn the world,
but in order that the world
might be saved through him.
And this is the judgment,
that the light has come into the world,
and people loved darkness
rather than light
because their deeds were evil.
For all who do evil hate the light…”
John sees his world, literally, in dark and light. John sees God and the angels of our better natures inhabiting one side of the moment, and Satan with his angels of our darker nature inhabiting the other side of the moment.
In John’s world, we can choose one or the other; there is not an in-between. We cannot live with a foot in both worlds, and a divided loyalty even to the smallest degree.
God or Satan,
Light or Dark,
Roman citizen or Christian –
in John’s mind, we must choose.
That is not our world.
Rarely if ever are our choices so crystal clear. Still, John has something to say, to show, to echo. Understanding what was in the wind swirling around his words will help us understand him, and in understanding him, help us get underneath him and hear the voice we are seeking.