The Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee



Friday in the Fourth Week of Lent, April 8, 2011, Tri-Diocese ECW Annual Meeting, Otey Parish Sewanee

“When the Messiah comes, no one will know where he is from” (Jo. 7:27).

I’ve lived most of my life in gracious and hospitable Southern cities and towns, including the one I grew up in; and it’s been my experience that these are welcoming places, full of folks who are interested in who you are and where you come from. There’s a sense of belonging there, a sense I’ve found in other places I’ve lived but perhaps not to the same extent. Sometimes that sense of belonging gets expressed in some peculiar ways. There are places in our region where you’re never quite considered to have arrived unless your grandmother was born there, “unto the third and fourth generation” (Ex. 20:5) as it says in the Scriptures. No need to name names: you all probably know the place or a place like it.

“Who’s your mama?” is a question that gets asked in Louisiana, which by contrast at least only goes back one generation. Of course the next question is “Are you Catholic?” and the one after that is “Can you make a roux?” Now if you don’t know how to make a roux, or don’t even know what one is, it probably doesn’t matter who your mama is! Still, for most places part of belonging is knowing who you are, so “Who’s your mama?” is an important question for all of us.

People in ancient Israel had a similar sense of people and place. Knowing where someone was from and who they were kin to was key: it still is in traditional cultures in the Middle East and elsewhere, where your tribal origin often trumps your nationality and everything else. There’s a reason for all those genealogies in the Bible, with who begat whom. As the crowd in our Gospel today tries to come to grips with who Jesus is, they figure they know who he is because they know where he’s from. “We know where this man is from” (Jo. 7:27), the crowd says: in other words, they know his mama. They know he’s Jesus of Nazareth.

But do they really know who he is? Because they know his mama they think they’ve got him; they think he’s a known quantity, someone they don’t have to take too seriously, a person they can dismiss. They want to keep their distance from Jesus, and keeping him close to home is the way to do it. He can’t be the Messiah because no one’s supposed to know where the Messiah’s from.

But there’s the irony of it: Jesus fits the definition of Messiah perfectly, because in fact the folks in the crowd don’t know where he’s from or where he’s going even though they think they do. The definition that’s meant to dismiss him does precisely the opposite. Jesus is an unknown quantity. He comes from God and was sent by God: someone they really don’t know so how can they know Jesus? In spite of what the crowd thinks about who Jesus is and where he’s from, you might say in truth that God is his mama.

Jesus knows who he is, in every sense. He knows who he comes from and where he’s going. Jesus is authentic, a man of integrity, pulled together and connected in the face of death on the cross. At this point in Lent we are moving into the shadow of that cross. “Let us test him with insult and torture, so that we may find out how gentle he is, and make trial of his forbearance” (Wis. 2:19). Betrayal and arrest lie ahead, but that’s not his destiny. The great transition that lies before him is death and resurrection. He’s come from God and returns to God, and the point of the mission, the reason he’s been sent, is to bring us with him through death into new and everlasting life.

It’s good for us to know who we are, to know who’s our mama. People we love have made us who we are and it’s good to be grateful. It’s important as well to be rooted in time and place, to know where we’re from and where we are. But when it comes to identity there is nothing more fundamental than knowing who Jesus is, in seeking our identity in his. When it comes to talk about belonging, we belong to him. We are meant to share his death and resurrection so that we can make that great transition with him. Lent represents that time when we can own our own trajectory from death to life. We too need to know where we’re from and where we’re going, and to whom we belong.

- The Rt. Rev’d John Bauerschmidt, Bishop of Tennessee

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