No one has ever spoken like this man

Read John 7

I hope that you read chapter 7 every day this week.  Don’t become complacent.  This study produces a return on investment for you and your families.  You are the beneficiaries of your own study.

I also hope that you read or watched the messages for the first part of this chapter.  These are meant to challenge you and send you back into the scriptures.  For every message that you receive, get Berean.  Search the scriptures using the messages as a challenge.

This morning’s pericope is something of a preface to the next two chapters.  You might think that the last part of the chapter should bring that chapter to conclusion, but remember the gospel authors wrote accounts without chapter numbers or headings.  What we talk about this morning gets you ready for the next two weeks.

So, let’s finish chapter 7.

The temple guards were sent to arrest Jesus and came back empty handed.  The Pharisees and priests were enraged.  They were ready to convict him in absentia. 

We know that they could not arrest Jesus because his time had not yet come.  It seems that maybe Mary, mother of Jesus, somehow managed to get his ministry kicked off a little earlier that he planned, but nothing was going to send him to the cross until it was the right time.  He had more to accomplish before then.

The guards gave their accounts.  No one has ever spoken the way this man did.

Angry that Jesus had not been brought before them and unwilling to give any credence to the account given by the guards, these religious leaders started ranting about how the guards had been deceived and the crowd was under a curse.

Has anyone of any status believed in this man?  The question was rhetorical as far as the leaders were concerned.  No one who counted for anything had believed in this man!

You have to wonder why these leaders wanted Jesus brought before them if they had already made up their minds.  Nicodemus, the Pharisee that you should remember from chapter 3 interjected that their own rules required a hearing before condemnation.

Instead of taking a breath, considering the counsel of this pharisee, and then proceeding according to the well-established procedures, the other leaders became angry with Nicodemus.

They countered the course of action presented by Nicodemus with accusations instead of reason and established regulation.  Are you from Galilee too?  No prophet comes out of Galilee.  Why are you being a stick in the mud?

So the religious hierarchy wanted to condemn a man for not following the rules—he healed on the Sabbath—but they were not willing to abide by their own rules and offer him a hearing.  You would think that the that dog don’t hunt rule would apply.

When reminded of the fact that this too would be transgression, they attacked the person instead of addressing the thoughts offered.  This foreshadows the kangaroo court that would follow later shortly before Jesus went to the cross.  Facts would be irrelevant.

This is also a glimpse into our time.  Someone proffers a statement and then instead of accepting, rejecting, or offering statements contrary to the view, so many will attack the author.

Once upon a time I wrote an editorial for The Oklahoman with the main line of thinking that I did not want the Bible taught in public schools.  I said that it would be sanitized to fit some government standard. 

There was a contemporary public conversation ongoing for several months about teaching the biblical creation story and evolution.  My contribution to this discussion was that instead of teaching the Bible in schools, we should teach thinking skills and tools so that our students could discern what they believed in faith, what was theory, and the standards that we used for finding something to be a fact.  I think I referenced the theory of evolution.

My print version received good reviews, so I published the exact same exposition online.  Never before had I received so many comments.  Over half of them began with the word “moron.”  These people didn’t read the 225 words that I had written.  They honed in on the phrase theory of evolution.

That prompted the comments: “Moron.  Evolution is fact.”

When you write something for public discussion, you expect some back and forth discourse.  I enjoy civil discourse more than most, but now the norm seems to be to attack the person instead of counter the argument. 

I can’t say that I was happy with all of the hateful comments, but I did think they proved my point that we should teach thinking skills and tools in school, instead of hoping students learn them indirectly in math, science, composition, or debating.

I have other examples that I won’t address now.  Many a coward is emboldened online but retreats when addressed in person.

All of that said to say, I think I know how Nicodemus felt.  You want to condemn this man for breaking our laws but you won’t abide by our laws to do it.  Instead you attack me.

Normally the Pharisees get lumped together as a group, but there are two Pharisees that we get some insight into in the gospels and Acts.  One is Nicodemus.  We don’t know if he ever was born of the Spirit but we know he sought to do the right thing according to his Hebrew faith, which included helping with the burial preparation and entombment. The other is Gamaliel, who offered sound counsel to the Sanhedrin when they wanted to put the apostles to death after the resurrection of the Christ. 

There is a third Pharisee that we know by name and are introduced to in Acts.  Saul of Tarsus studied under Gamaliel and gave us much of our New Testament.

Usually, I give you something to take home and chew on from the day’s scripture.  Today, I ask you to consider the mindset of most of the ruling council and about half of the Jews.  Half the people didn’t care what Jesus had to say.  They just wanted to trap him, trick him, or somehow do away with him by any means necessary.

Jesus was a threat to established religion and the existing way of life.  Jesus brought love and told his followers to believe, have faith and love one another.  Those directives fell on deaf ears among the religious leaders.  They could only think about getting him out of the way and getting back to the way things were.

The leaders of that day had neither eyes to see nor ears to hear, only hearts to condemn.

This short pericope at the end of chapter 7 will help you to understand much of what transpired in chapters 8 and 9.

If you need a nugget to chew on, try to be civil in your conversation, but mostly be ready for what is to come in the next two chapters.

Jesus is life.  Jesus is Lord.

Amen.

Just who is this Jesus?

Read John 7

Just who is this Jesus?

It was still the festival.  Jesus was still teaching in the temple courts and he told the crowd, he would not be around much longer.  Many questions circulated.

How can he be the Messiah?  The Christ must come from Bethlehem.  He did but they did not know that and Jesus did not feel obligated to participate in an interrogation.

Is this the man they want to kill?  Well why don’t they do something if they have the goods on him?  The infamous they was at work even long ago.

Surely the Messiah will perform more miracles than this man has, or will he?  What more should we expect?  Remember, most of the miracles of Jesus took place in Galilee, but word traveled throughout the area.

Jesus told the crowd that he was doing the will of the one who sent him.  God sent him.  This did not sit well with some.  He said that those who came to him would receive living water, that is the Spirit of God.

Jesus said he would only be with them for a short time and then would go where they could not come.  Speculation abounded.  Greece?  Other places where the Jews had been scattered over the centuries?  Where could he go where they could not?

Some believed and some wanted him arrested.  Some wondered why the religious leaders didn’t do something.  Eventually, they tried.

We are told that both the crowd and the religious leaders wanted to seize him but could not for a single reason.  His time had not yet come.

The people were divided.  Some came to him believing him to be prophet or Messiah.  Some wanted him arrested, but that would not happen on this day.  His time had not yet come.

Who was this Jesus?

This scripture in John’s seventh chapter is an opportunity to share something that many of you have heard before.  It’s C.S. Lewis’s Liar, Lunatic, or Lord exposition.  It’s worth hearing once more.

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

The people were divided.  Jesus had yet to go to the cross.  The Spirit had yet to be given.  We should cut these folks a little slack.

But what about us?  We have the whole story?  Do we believe that Jesus lived, died, and rose again?  Was he the Son of God?  Have we received salvation and life from him?

If the answer is yes, then Jesus is our Lord.

Jesus is life.  Jesus is Lord.

Amen!

Do we want the truth or to paint our own narrative?

Read John 7

Jesus went to the festival, initially keeping a low profile, but then headed to the temple courts and began teaching.  The people were, of course, amazed.  Elsewhere we note that Jesus taught with authority not the way their regular teachers offered God’s word.

The Jews which surely included some religious leaders were confounded on where this man got his education.  They didn’t ask if he went to Princeton or Vanderbilt or Memphis Theological Seminary.  They would have been asking, “Who was this man’s rabbi?’”

It doesn’t appear that they asked Jesus directly but he answered them directly.  He was from God.  Everything he knew came straight from the Father.  You would know this if you truly desired to follow God.

Jesus confronted the crowd.  “Why are you trying to kill me?”

Jesus knew how to get under the skin of a hypocrite.  “Moses gave you the law, yet none of you keep it.”

Ouch!  That one had to hurt.  The crowd responded that he was demon possessed.

Jesus noted that he did a miracle and the people were amazed.  It was on the Sabbath, so now the people thought he was evil.

Jesus gave them an example of how hypocritical they were.

 If the Sabbath falls on the eight day after your kid is born, you still bring him for circumcision.  You say that circumcision is from Moses, but really it came from God’s command long before Moses floated down the river.  Moses was possibly the worst example for obeying God’s directions to circumcise, but Jesus didn’t confront the crowd with that fact.

He did move on with his analogy stating that if you believe it’s just fine to circumcise on the Sabbath, then why would it be wrong to heal a man completely on such a holy day?

Jesus finally got to a command.  Stop judging on appearances.  Judgment is only correct if it is done in righteousness.  There’s more on that in the next chapter.

Let’s look at this simple directive:  Stop judging on appearances.  We live in a society that lives by just the opposite.  We live in a time when the first person to tell the story gets to paint the narrative.  They get to tell it from their perspective.  More information will become available later, but painting the narrative seems more important than justice or righteousness or seeking the truth.

It’s our human nature to tell things exclusively from our perspective.  If you are big on following the rules, someone who does something that seems contrary to the rules is evil or your enemy or at least a threat to your way of life.

Jesus, Lord of the Sabbath, did good on the Sabbath.  The Sabbath, a day made for man and not the other way around, is a day to renew and restore man, so why not a complete restoration?  Why not healing?

If you only see the rules, you are blind to the right living needed to evaluate what’s going on.  Living for Christ is more than rule-following. 

Rules work from the outside in.  When we received Jesus as Lord, we received the Spirit and are equipped to live from the inside-out.

There is nothing wrong with the rules.  God gave his chosen people and gave us directives for our own good.  They have not gone away but have been fulfilled completely by the Lord walking in the flesh and have been surpassed by his glory.

We are the beneficiaries of this.  We have received the Spirit. If we let the Spirit rule in our lives, we have eyes to see and may judge with righteousness.

I understand rules.  I enjoy writing and grammar and syntax are my close friends.  

So, when I see someone write Y O U R for you are, my skin crawls a little.  When someone says I have went instead of I went or I have gone, occasionally the blood vessels in my neck start to show.  When someone says, I seen it, I can only shake my head and say, “that’s Oklahoma.”

Do you know that the past tense of lite is lighted?  For decades lit has come into common usage.  It was fully accepted after the first Gulf War started.  

Do you remember the pilot’s live account of the bombing in Baghdad?  It’s lit up like a Christmas tree.  There was no going back to lighted.

In the midst of the syntax slaughter that is part of my daily consumption, I often can negotiate the intent, but sometimes not.  I like the rules and don’t like to see them change.

Those are man-made rules and they are subject to change.  God’s rules are living and active but not subject to change. They are subject to being abused by those who only see the words, who would condemn a man for healing on the Sabbath.

Cumberland Presbyterians have a term for what we are called to do with God-given rules and scripture as a whole.  We are to engage scripture with the illumination of God’s own Spirit. 

If we want to judge correctly, we must set aside the narrative being painted for us by the world, set aside our own personal preferences and agenda, and receive the message from God illuminated by his own Spirit that lives within us.

Do not let your hearts be hardened by rules but liberated by the Spirit who lives within you and knows the rules first hand.

Amen.

A sound mind and a low profile

Read John 7

Imagine if your older brother suddenly was out and about the countryside telling people that he was sent by God.  What if he claimed to be the Christ?  What if people started gathering whenever he came around?  What if they were calling him a prophet or the Messiah?

What if the same guy who got to use the bathroom first all of your life, was steering clear of Jerusalem even though it was time to go for one of the Lord’s festivals?  It was likely the Festival of Booths or Tabernacles, but what if him not going gave you a little leverage with your older brother?

Hey bro, you can’t be laying low here in Galilee if you are out to make a name for yourself?

What kind of prophet doesn’t go to Jerusalem for all the feasts and festivals?

There is a toast often attributed to the Sandhurst Military Academy in Great Britain or sometimes to the Royal Navy.  It is: “To a short and bloody war.”  What a crazy toast.

It means if there are some friendly casualties among the senior officers and noncommissioned officers, there is more room for promotion.  It’s a little gallows humor that says it’s just the cost of doing business.

It seems like Jesus had some brothers with the same attitude.  They didn’t believe he was the Messiah, at least not until after he went to the cross.  They thought they might entice him to go make himself a target in the middle of that hornet’s nest called Jerusalem. 

Here is the thinking:  If they take out big brother, we all move up one. We all know who our daddy is and he is of this earth.

Jesus was not to be taunted into doing something that was not part of his mission or not the right time.  He was doing the work that his Father sent him to do. 

He did give his own brothers a bit of a chastising.  The world can’t hate you.  You are of the world.  You are not seeking God.  You blend right in with this self-serving world.  You go on ahead.

Jesus did go, but kept a low profile.  He heard what others were saying privately.  He is a good man.  He is a phony.

The thing was that nobody would weight in publicly.  There was a sense of fear that prevailed.  You didn’t want to commit too early and end up on the wrong side of this thing.

And so, we come back once again to fear.  Fear prevailed.  It was not a healthy fear such as the fear of the Lord, but it was a fear of the ruling religious Jews.  It was a debilitating fear. 

Remember that this was Jerusalem.  This was the place where prophets were killed. He would go to Jerusalem later very publicly because his time had come, but not just yet.  He had more work to do before the cross.

Fear was at work in Jerusalem.  Fear has always been around.  Fear waits for easy targets then builds momentum.  Fear is still at work today.

We frequently recite the scripture from 2 Timothy 1:7.  But do we live it?

Jesus knew if he rode into Jerusalem for this festival, he would be killed.  He would be killed as a sacrifice for our sins, but not yet.

He was willing to and did sacrifice his life for us, but he did it on his own terms—actually on his Father’s terms.  He was not afraid of dying, though he fully understood how difficult it would be.  The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. 

But he had more to accomplish.  He would fulfil what the law required that no human had ever fulfilled before.  And he would fulfill all prophecy concerning him.  He used the sound mind which God has also granted us to accomplish his mission.

So, what do I do with this today?  We are not debilitated by fear but our steps are purposed by our mission.  When faced with a difficult choice that might involve danger or our safety or the safety of our families, we must first understand our mission and then decide our course of action based on how best to accomplish this.

That does not always involve diving in head-first or going boldly into the fray.  We first assess what we are purposed to accomplish, then we decide and act.  It’s that whole sound mind thing again, but with purpose as your rudder.  Safety and survival are important, but our mission is our rudder in making sound decisions.

God may have given some the gift of martyr.  It seems like a strange gift, but we consider it a gift from God.  Most of you were not given this gift. 

When Jesus talked about dying before you could live, for most of us that was not a martyr’s death.  We don’t discard our survival instincts.  The gift of martyr seems to have been given to a very few.

All were given a commission and a command.  We are to take the gospel to the world and be known by our love for one another. 

Jesus came from his Father in heaven on a mission, one to save the world.  There would be a time to ride publicly into Jerusalem and a time to come discreetly. 

We too are on a mission.  We take God’s love and good news to the world.  When we decide upon our course of action in a world full of fear, ask if your decision brings you closer to fulfilling your mission or puts your mission in jeopardy?

Don’t be overcome by fear.  Don’t live recklessly.  You are on a mission from God.  Your decisions must support your mission.

Amen.