Month: March 2016

A lot can be said about just the first six verses.  The imagery of the shepherd is one that we heard on Sunday.  We were told on Sunday in Revelation 7 that the Lamb, the one who was sacrificed on our behalf, became the shepherd.  This is repeated here in this Scripture as well.  Jesus is called the gate and then he is called the shepherd.  There are so many images of a shepherd in Scripture.  The most famous is probably Psalm 23 which describes the Lord as our shepherd.  

Interestingly enough the times that shepherd is used the most in Scripture is when it is describing the religious leaders of the Jewish people and they are called bad shepherds.  You can look at Ezekiel 34 pretty much the whole chapter.  Not nice things are said about the shepherds of the people who were responsible to bring them to a closer relationship with the Father.  Jeremiah 25:34ff also speaks of the shepherds on whom the Lord has turned his back because they have not done his bidding.  So it is nice here to get a good shepherd who will care for his sheep.

I want you to be aware of this imagery where the sheep in the pen come out of the pen because they recognize the voice of the shepherd.  This is no joke.  Oftentimes the shepherds would be in a type of co-op where they would all put their sheep in a common pen.  In the morning when it was time to get their sheep one at a time the shepherds would stand at the gate and call for their sheep.  Only their sheep would come out at this time.  This is still true today.  Shepherds still call their sheep by name and the sheep respond if they know the shepherd or run away if they do not.

Our desire ought to be to run to the Lord whenever he calls us.  There are some mixed metaphors in these verses where Jesus goes from being the shepherd to the gate.   But it all works, doesn’t it?  Jesus is the one through whom we have access to the Father.  Jesus is the one with whom we are able take comfort and in whom we are able to trust.  The words that I love in this chapter are: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”  I’m all about having an abundant life.  It is what the Lord wants us all to have.  He wants us all to have a life which is full of his bidding and his desires for us.  

This is one of the first times that Jesus argues with his detractors while they have stones in hand ready to stone him to death.  It is a bit of a risky strategy, but it seems to work in this case.  Why are you going to execute me for the works that I do.  We are not going to execute you for your works but for your words.  But my works reflect my words, so if my works are not of God’s bidding then you can have a case against me.  It is a very convincing argument.  All the people knew that his miracles and his healings had to come from God.  They had never seen anyone who performed the miracles that Jesus was performing, so he had to come from God…right?  Well, they went from wanting to stone him to wanting to grab him, and he escaped from their hands.

He had enough, he went back across the Jordan to where John had been and many came to him there.  Scripture tells us that many believed in him there.  Isn’t it interesting that Jesus never had a church.  Think about that.  So much of our faith today is wrapped up in our church.  What the pastor says, who the pastor is, the community of believers with whom we celebrate life’s joys and trials, the programs that we have and those that we are not able to offer.  So much of our faith is wrapped up in our church.  Did I mention that Jesus never had a church?  

Not having a physical structure that ties you down has its advantages.  You are more mobile.  You are nimble, you are able to address needs as they pop up within your community and you have way more resources at your disposal than if you have a campus with its upkeep and other difficulties.  A church without walls allows people to be a church just as a people.  I know, I have experienced that type of a church.  It is intense, it is non-stop.  But it also  has its disadvantages.  A church without walls is also a church that is putting a lot of its energies into finding places where its programs can be carried out.  A church without walls may have more difficulty in making a mark within a community.  

But did I mention that Jesus never had a church?

An entire chapter dedicated to the repercussions when Jesus heals a man born blind.  This man and his healing will resonate later in this Gospel as many began believing in Jesus  because of this one act.  There is one verse which should sound familiar.  Try out vs.25 and you will find the following words: “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”  Amazing grace, you can hear this formerly blind man say, how sweet the sound.  But the whole basis for this chapter is a bit puzzling.  A wonderful miracle just took place and something unheard of happened.  A man born blind was given back his sight, nothing like this had ever happened before.  Everyone seems to be caught up in whether he was actually born blind or not.  Everyone seems to be concerned on whether it happened on a Sabbath or not.  Everyone seemed to be concerned what kind of person Jesus was which somehow would dictate whether the healing was legitimate or not.  The fact of the matter was that this man was born blind, and now he can see…period.

Jesus seeks him out after they have kicked him out of the temple, basically after he was excommunicated.  A curious statement can be read in vs. 22 where we hear that “anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue”.  This man was put out and so Jesus, claiming some responsibility to that, seeks him out.  “Do you believe in the Son of Man? I am he.”  As a result of this statement, and not of the healing, he worships Jesus.  Sometimes it takes not just an act, but an explanation of an act to elicit belief.  

When I was in high school I was aggressively opposed to any faith in Jesus.  Even though my parents were missionaries, we went to church each Sunday, we read Scripture before meals, I was strongly opposed to any type of Christian faith, and they knew it.  My struggle was that I did not want anyone or anything to tie me down and Christian faith as I understood it was a set of rules that we had to follow in order to be a Christian.  To be fair to my parents, this was not their lesson, this was something that I had picked up along the way with my exposure to more fundamentalist Christianity.  But I wanted a freedom of thought and life that I believed Christianity could not provide.  

January 14, 1986 (I just realized this was 30 years ago), when I was a senior in high school I came to know Jesus and the relationship that he provided.  At a winter retreat I had a born-again moment when I realized that following Jesus was not about rules, but rather about a relationship, that changed everything and I gave my life to him.  John 8:32 was instrumental to me in understanding who Jesus is.  Before I was a disciple I had put in the year book as a senior that my goal in life was: “to be free”.  As a result, when Jesus says: “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free” it gave me the understanding that Jesus could provide me with a life of freedom.  When we become disciples of Jesus Christ we are free to do anything that we want, because what we want would be the same as that which our Father would want.  Without a doubt John 8:32 is my absolute favorite verse in all Scripture.

But most people want to focus in on verses 1-11 with a powerful story of Jesus forgiving an adulteress in the middle of a public square.  This story is repeatedly used as an example of how Jesus takes an impossible situation and allows His Grace to flow through it.  The words we use today in order to decide what to do in impossible situations with people is whether we are enabling or empowering people.  How does Jesus’ forgiveness empower this woman instead of enable her?  I don’t have an answer.  He just takes a risk with her and we don’t know if she goes back to sinning or not.  We hope that the shock of her near death experience is enough to bring her back to a recognition of what God wants her to do in her life.  But we just don’t know.  Jesus tells her to go and sin no more, but doesn’t set up any parameters to make sure that she doesn’t go and sin no more.  I’m wondering if that is a lesson for us anytime we want to control the future of someone over whom we might have some certain responsibilities.  Take a risk and allow them to explore and find what they are able to do.

A lot of conflict in these verses.  You have family conflict with Jesus and his brothers with the brothers not believing Jesus and putting him to the test (vs.3ff).  You have conflict with the crowd who was involved in considerable complaining about Jesus (vs.12).  You have conflict with Jesus and the Pharisees as they tried to arrest him, but somehow no one put a hand on him (vs.44).  There was an internal conflict within the Pharisees and their guards and their own Pharisees none of whom wanted to arrest him because he was speaking in such a way that no one had ever heard before (vs.47).  This chapter leads us from Jesus who is the solidifying person for those who believe, to being a divisive factor among those who do not believe.  There was much discussion about his qualifications and about his stature in light of the crowds who either wanted to worship him or arrest him.  It is fairly clear that Jesus created much division among those who heard him.  He was not someone whom everyone automatically loved and wanted to follow.

This is a fairly important point because we often think that if we lived in Jesus’ day then we would have been the perfect disciple.  That simply is not the case.  We may have been part of the crowd that complained about Jesus because in some way he was not meeting our needs.  It is good for us to realize that discipleship is not a slam dunk.  Meaning, being a follower of Jesus Christ will never be something that is easy or will never be something that those around us will approve or rally around.  Our task, as Nicodemus shows us at the end of this chapter, is to lead people to Jesus in the way in which we feel empowered to do so.  That may be with a quiet statement about his innocence, or about his power, or about the way in which he has impacted our lives.  Once we do that, there is no guarantee that people will stand on our side.  In fact, for Nicodemus at least and this might be true for us as well, we just might be ridiculed and ostracized.  We need to be willing to pay that price.

John 6 contains the Lord’s Supper.  You may not have picked up on it.  You will notice that at the Last Supper in John, and we aren’t even close to that yet, that Jesus does not distribute the bread and the cup like he does in all the other Gospels.  Instead, he has the act of washing his disciples’ feet.  Again, we are getting ahead of ourselves, except we really aren’t.  In the other Gospels when Jesus takes the bread he blesses it and the word used is eucharisto in the Greek.  There is another word for blessing in the Greek which is eulogo and that is used when Jesus blesses the children and lays out all of the the beatitudes with the blesseds that follow.  Here in John 6 guess what word is used for vs.11 for “giving thanks” or some translations read “blessed”?  In fact we find that same word in 23 when it describes Jesus giving thanks and then distributing the bread.  It is the word eucharisto which is the same term used in the Last Supper.  I have always seen this scene in John as the Gospel writer’s portrayal of the institution of the Lord’s Supper which is not relegated to the 12 disciples but rather is given to all who would come near.  I find it equally compelling that the bread and the fish, especially in John, are given to Jesus by a young child.  Jesus is able to use the elements that are provided to him by a child in order to institute something that will last for thousands of years.  How can we ever say that we don’t have anything to offer to the Lord when we have this example of a young child offering something to Jesus that will stay in the annals of history for millennia?

The movement is pretty quick in the chapter as we go from the feeding of the large crowd (and you can see a crowd of FPCers in the picture above in a place that could have been similar to the one where Jesus fed the multitude) to Jesus going down to the shoreline which you see in the horizon in the picture above as he realizes that people really like him and are wanting to make him some sort of king.  That really wasn’t part of his plans.

It is in these following verses where we have a very significant explanation of the Lord’s Supper.  It is here where Jesus states: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”  This sounds very close to the Roman Catholic perspective that what happens at communion is that we eat the body and drink the blood of Jesus.  We do not believe that the juice and the bread physically become the body and the blood.  We believe that there is a real spiritual presence of Jesus during communion which is not present when communion is missing from the service.  This is why John Calvin felt like we should take part in communion every single time that the word of God is preached.  I have never served in a church where that has been done,  primarily because I probably lack the courage to suggest or recommend it.  But Calvin felt like it was a necessity and not just something we do for the sake of symbolism, but rather for the sake of transformation.

We can learn from Jesus who after he teaches about his body and his blood sees the departure of “many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.”  It was not a popular teaching.  Jesus’ next step is to ask those remaining: “Do you also want to go away?”  He didn’t want to keep any who felt in any way that they were being forced to stay.  Jesus did not care about numbers, he cared about disciples.  Even though I believe that if you make strong disciples then the numbers will increase, that simply did not happen with Jesus.  We might want to rethink our approach on this matter.

This is the most comprehensive chapter on Jesus proclaiming to the world who he truly is.  You will find no other Scripture that highlights the person of Jesus, from the mouth of Jesus, than this one.  The chapter begins with the healing of a man who is laying by the pool waiting for, as some manuscripts say, an angel of the Lord who would periodically come into the water to bathe and stir up the water.  First one in wins!  The man complains to Jesus that he has no one to help him into the water.  But did you hear the question Jesus asks the man: “Do you want to be made well?”  The implication was: are you sure that you want to enter the mainstream of society when you could remain as you are, crippled, without hope, but also without responsibility and having people serving you on a daily basis.  It is an insulting question with ramifications that are equally disturbing.  Who in their right mind would ever choose the life that he is living, even if not everyone would be equally motivated?  Even if we are not disabled, there are certainly times when we do not want to be healed, at least not just yet.  We want to wallow in our self pity and allow people to see the true difficulties that life holds for us.  It becomes a prison for us then.  Jesus does not address the man’s complaint of there being no one to help him.  He doesn’t even give him a choice or allow him to say either yes or no, I want to be healed.  He just heals him.

Above you can find the pool where Jesus healed the blind man.  It is still there and you can see the five porticoes and you can imagine what it would have looked like with the people draped around it looking and waiting for the healing that they hoped would come.  Did you notice the conversation that takes place when the healed man is confronted by the religious leaders?  They chastise him for carrying his mat on the Sabbath, which is okay, because you were not supposed to do that.  But when he responds that he was healed and that the man who healed him told him to carry it their response is really telling.

Instead of focusing on the fact that this man was healed, which should have stopped them in their tracks since it was a cause for celebration, they asked him who it was who told him to carry his mat.  The question was not: “Who healed you?”  The question was: “Who told you to carry your mat?”  I would think that if I heard that someone was healed I would be focusing on the healing and not on the breaking of the law.  This is what the pastor said this past Sunday.  Sometimes we are so focused on the rules and the regulations that we miss the compassion and the miracle that Jesus provides us in relationships.  

If you then take this chapter and read from vs. 17 all the way through the end you hear Jesus speak about who he is.  This is crucial.  Here he tells those who would listen that he is equal to the Father.  Here he speaks about the raising of the dead and that the Son gives life to whomever he wishes.  He defines himself as greater than John and being directly sent by the Father, in fact that he is equal to the Father.  Only John provides us with such an extensive understanding of who Jesus is.

The Samaritan woman at the well gives us so many insights into who Jesus is.  We hear that Jesus’ popularity is taking hold and so he is forced to leave Judea, and travel north to Galilee.  Look at the map below and you will get an idea of what was all involved in that journey.

So you can see that Jerusalem is firmly ensconced in Judea, right above the Dead Sea on the left or Western side.  As you make your way north toward Galilee you can see Sychar on the map.  There were ways to get around Samaria either on the Sea route or inland, but it would have made the voyage so much longer.  The journey from Judea to Galilee was always considered a very dangerous journey.  You remember the story of the Good Samaritan?  Well the Jewish man was beaten along that same route.  

Samaria was not considered a friendly land for the Jews, but the road had to be taken.  Jesus stops right in the middle of the land, which was unusual and he is there at noon, at the heat of the day.  Not a normal time to stop and take a break, normally you would want to push through at this time.  But what was even more strange was a woman going to the well at noon.  This was the worst time of the day and it was assumed that no one else was going to be at the well at that time.  This is crucial.  She assumed that she would be at the well by herself, and that was the way that she wanted it to be.  Except Jesus was there.  He planned to be there so that he could minister to her even as she was asked for water in vs.7.  

Isn’t that what Jesus does, though?  He meets us right where we are, often on our own home turf and addresses our need, even when we aren’t too sure what our needs might be.  The woman is amazed and wonders if this might be the Messiah.  She becomes the first foreign evangelist bringing the men of the village to come and see.  It reminds me that Jesus has always used men and women to bring about the declaration of his Gospel message.  

So for the first time in these 72 days this post is a day late.  I hope it has nothing to do with the coincidence of the beginning of March Madness.  

Has anyone heard of John 3:16 before?  It is a memory verse that I am sure most of the Western world has seen or heard at least one time.  But what is not often matched with John 3:16 is the following verse in 17.  We read in 16 that God loves the world so much that he sent his Son.  That is then matched with the declaration that Jesus came into the world not so that the world would be condemned, but rather that it would be saved.  That is a crucial part of this chapter.  Jesus came not to condemn, but to save.  The verses that follow 17 give a great road map as to how that salvation works.  Those who believe in Jesus are not condemned.  I hope that doesn’t sound too simplistic, but really there is no other path as we will be reading a little later on in John 14.  This is the consistency that we find in this Gospel.  Jesus is the way, he is the only way.  There are no other paths that lead to heaven except through Jesus Christ.  There is only one God and that God is the one who is fully revealed in Jesus Christ.  Any other worshiping community that lifts up the name of God but is not in the name of Jesus Christ as Lord and God, is only following false idols and false gods. 

There is an incredible tension in our culture today to make sure that you take a stand on either inclusivity or exclusivity.  John 3:16 is incredibly inclusive.  God loved the world, the whole world and the purpose of Jesus is so that the entire world can be saved.  But there is no denying an exclusive aspect to our Christian faith.  The salvation of humanity revolves around Jesus.  Even John the Baptist recognizes this as he states in a quote that we use often at First Presbyterian before our Sunday morning worship: “He must increase, but I must decrease.”  The signs that we talked about in the previous chapter all point to Jesus as Lord, Messiah, and God.  

Getting back to the beginning of the chapter we do find ourselves with Nicodemus who asks the question: What does being born again mean?  I do not hesitate to use that term born again even with the negative baggage that comes with it.  I know that from the Greek it could mean literally born from above, but the question that Nicodemus follows up with: “Can one enter a second time into a mother’s womb?”, makes one think that Jesus must have said born again. Nicodemus takes him literally and is completely confused.  Being born again is a result of our desire and our will being put on hold and Jesus coming in and taking full control of our lives.  Nicodemus knew that Jesus was someone special.  No one else could do what he was doing.  That is the same realization that we have.  Only Jesus is able to answer the prayers that we have seen him answer.  

I use Jesus’ first miracle every single time that I do premarital counseling.  Turning water to wine at a wedding is a wonderful symbol of Jesus wanting the celebration of a marriage to continue and not allow it to stop.  I know it may be a bit of a stretch, but there is some real affinity to Jesus knowing that the party would end, and thus bring shame upon the couple, and wanting it to continue, and thus bringing them praise.  But there was also another lesson in this miracle.  If you notice how vs. 11 describes this miracle you will see a theme that will continue throughout the book of John.  John calls this first miracle a “sign”.  If you look later in the chapter you will see in vs.23 that many believed because of the “signs” that he was doing.  If you back up just a little bit you see them asking in vs. 18 for a “sign” that he was capable of doing all that he said he was able to do.  

The word “sign” in Greek is semenion.  What Jesus is wanting to portray and what John allows us to understand is that every single thing that he did on the earth was a sign pointing to His Father.  The signs that Jesus performed can also be called miracles.  The miracles of Jesus all point to who Jesus is.  Jesus was not quite ready to perform his first sign of turning water to wine, but his mom insisted and who can say no to their mom?

His next sign, which wasn’t much of a miracle but sure did leave a mark on the temple, was to drive out the money changers from the temple.  I know, if you were paying attention to the other Gospels then you would have noticed that Jesus normally drives out the money changers at the end of the Gospel and right after he rides triumphantly into Jerusalem.  This is why I’m loving John because it gives us such a different perspective than the other Gospels.  

I’m lying prostrate on the couch.  I just finished running a marathon and every single muscle, joint, toe, and a plethora of other body parts simply hurt.  I’ve been training for 5 months, and what I can’t get out of my mind is that tomorrow starts a life without training for a marathon or for triathlon.  I’ve been in training mode for over a year now, and I think it is time to take a break and move on.  We just finished the Gospel of Luke and as you open the Gospel of John you will feel like you are taking a break from the Gospels, when in fact you are not.  John is different, very different.  John is my favorite Gospel because he is so different.  His emphasis is completely on showing his readers that Jesus is God.  The divinity of Jesus is underlined over and over again.

As Luke was also the writer of the Acts of the Apostles so John is the writer of Revelation and possibly the Letters of I, II, and III John.  Look near the end of Scripture and you will find those three letters.  They are a lot more like Revelation than they are like the Gospel of John.  The Gospel was thought to be the last one written, and so potentially around 80-90AD.  It is thought to be written to a primarily Jewish audience, as we can see with John stressing the Jewishness of Jesus and his disciples.  The temple and the synagogue are the primary places of teachings and most of what happens in the Gospel happens within a Jewish religious context.  Having said that, unfortunately, John has also been used throughout history as anti-semitic fodder.  The term “Jesus Killers” is picked out of John and others have used this Gospel to underline the culpability of the Jewish race while dismissing, if not completely disregarding, the culpability that we all have in our own betrayal of Jesus.  

Now on to the first chapter of John.  There is honestly too much in the first chapter for me to put in this blog.  As you read it I want you to think about what it means that we say that Jesus is God in the flesh.  Jesus is one of us, and yet also totally other.  John 1 gives us the trinitarian theology that tells us that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were all present at creation.  Did you hear what I said?  The Son was present at creation.  Our single God never separates from Himself, but rather all three persons are present at the same time at all times.  

As you read this chapter I would love for you to focus on the verses 1-16 and you will find so much of the heart of our Christian theology.  I can’t wait to break into John, I hope you will love it as much as I do.