Partakers Christian Podcasts

Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 36

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 36 - John 8:23, 28 & 58
I AM… I AM… I AM…

No fewer than three times in this chapter John records that Jesus used the personal name of God, ‘ego eimi’ in Greek. John has them carefully lined up, two in rapid succession, then the third one later at the end of his discussion with the group of leading Jews he has been with for some time. In fact that third one brings the discussion to a rapid end.

Let me imagine something of what the reaction to what he said must have been of one of his hearers? It must have gone something like this: first he said to them, “You are from below; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world. I told you that you would die in your sins, for unless you believe that I am he you will die in your sins.”

Our typical hearer will scarcely have noticed that his reply included the words I AM. As we noticed before the words he used could equally mean ‘It’s me’ or as they are translated in the NIV ‘I am he’. So all that happened was that they said to him, “Who are you?” Good question. It has been asked over and over again ever since. The answer is much the same as it has always been, I am who I have always told you I am but you are listening but not hearing.

So the conversation continues and Jesus said to them, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he, and that I do nothing on my own authority, but speak just as the Father taught me.”

Again there is the phrase ‘I am he’ in the middle of that statement, a little more obviously this time. Whether our typical listener will have thought that an odd thing to say is hard to say. We might imagine him turning to his neighbour and saying something like: “did you hear what he said there? ‘lifted up’ sounds very like what Isaiah said about the servant ‘my servant shall act wisely; he shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted’. I find that a bit much to take. He is getting well above himself. He thinks he is going to be high – does that mean sitting on a throne? - and being exalted! And then he sneaked in the phrase I AM. I don’t like it – I don’t like him. Things are getting a bit much.”

The conversation goes on for some time, another 30 verses in our Bibles, with the crowd and Jesus getting more and more at cross purposes with each other. The crowd is clearly understanding less and less of what Jesus is telling them or, perhaps, accepting less and less of what he is saying. They say he is demon possessed; he says they belong to their father the devil. They probably argued more forcefully in those days than we are prepared to do these days, but that is strong stuff. Then we are told that Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.”

That does it. He has quite clearly said that he was around before Abraham and then uses the critical words ‘ego eimi’, I AM, of himself so he is saying both ‘It’s me’ and I have the name of God.

Our imaginary guy is likely to have said at this point something like ‘hand me that stone!’ with the distinct intention of throwing it at Jesus to knock him down and kill him. But such is the power of the personality of Jesus that he is able to disappear in the crowd and slip away.

John has been hammering away at just one point. I used to have a colleague who liked to say good lecturing was ‘tell ‘em what you are going to tell ‘em; tell ‘em; then tell them what you have told ‘em’. John clearly had the same philosophy.

Have you got it very firmly into your head JESUS was GOD. If not read it all again, and again …

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 35

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 35 - John 8:18
Two extraordinary statements

The reply of Jesus when he is challenged about what he is claiming when he says he is the Light of the World is quite extraordinary. He says, “I am the one who bears witness about myself, and the Father who sent me bears witness about me.” His accusers have just said that his witness is not valid because he needs two witnesses (Deuteronomy 19:15) and he is not a good witness to himself. His reply is – yes, I do have two witnesses: one is myself, special because of who I am, and the other is God who, of course, you cannot see! No wonder his opponents weren’t exactly convinced by what he said.

But Jesus was far from stupid so he must have had good reasons for what he said and have expected his assertions to be accepted as true. There is a problem to unravel here.

It seems to me that the only possible explanation is that Jesus, and what he said and did, were the dominant features of the festival. His was not a minor voice speaking on the fringe of the festival. When he said ‘I am the light of the world’ his voice rang out above all the competing voices. Everyone except the chief priests and Pharisees was accepting him as the number one person in Jerusalem. He was a prophet, perhaps even more than a prophet.

In their culture the two most important things about a person were who their father was and where they came from. Jesus played on that. He said, I know where I came from and where I am going, but you do not know where I come from or where I am going.” And “’the Father who sent me bears witness about me.’ They said to him therefore, ‘Where is your Father?’ Jesus answered, ‘You know neither me nor my Father.’” They didn’t know either where he came from or who his father was. So he had deliberately drawn attention to the puzzle. In a way that would make him all the more different, mysterious and exciting. What he said had only added to the mystery.

It was a major challenge to follow him; “Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” he said. Like Abraham – “Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going.” He had to take a step into the unknown. He had to leave his comfortable city life and take to camels and tents and a journey with no maps or sat-nav to show him the way.

He had to take a major step of faith. He did so because “he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.” We too have to take that step of faith into the mysterious unknown because we do not know what the Lord has in store for us. Be sure, however, that it will be rewarding and challenging and a great deal better than any alternative would be. Step out – boldly – and you too will have the light of life.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 34

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 34 - John 8:12
The light of the world

In one of his greatest and most loved passages the prophet Isaiah said: “he has made glorious … Galilee of the nations. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone.”

With his divine gift for looking down through many centuries the great prophet saw that a light was coming and that it would have to do with Galilee. Of course, he thought he was talking about his own day but we can see that he was actually forecasting the appearance in the province of Galilee of Jesus some 800 years later. He thought of this person, unknown to him but known to us, as a light. It is no surprise to us that he went on to say: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given.” Jesus was not born in Galilee but circumstances meant that he grew up there. He will have thought of himself as a Galilean.

Given that background it is no surprise that John saw Jesus, and Jesus saw himself, as a light, the light.

Jesus was still at the Festival of Tabernacles that he went to when it was halfway through in 7: 14. It was a festival of both water and light. The light part had huge lamps burning in the Temple courts at night, bright enough to throw light over all the city of Jerusalem so that everyone was aware of them and could profit by them. It would have avoided painfully stubbed toes or branches lashing across the face if you had to walk past trees or bushes.

Jesus stood up at the festival. “I am the light of the world” he said. Not ‘a light in the world’ but the light of the world, so not just of Jerusalem but of the world, of lands they knew nothing about. They may just have heard of China but they will never have imagined there was a country called America far across the seas with no land connection to theirs. He is the only true light of all the countries of this world of ours.

There are many Old Testament references to light. A pillar of light guided the Israelites through the desert during the Exodus. Light was often a picture of the Word of God. Psalm 119: 105 says ‘Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path’, so the meaning of light is now guidance rather than anything physical.

All this may seem odd to us because there has been a distinct failure of much of the world to recognize him. He was the Prince of Peace according to Isaiah, who went on to say that ‘of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end.’ But wars continue to rage – more at the moment than there have been in much of the last half century. But we must not be short sighted. When Jesus was on this earth the most civilized country in the world had regular circus shows where man had to fight man, often to the death, for the entertainment of the common people; they strung people up, sometimes by the thousand, in crucifixion, the most awful form of execution man has ever devised; it was a dreadfully cruel world. Yes, we still have wars, but with only very few exceptions we do not see the barbarisms of those days repeated anywhere in this world of ours. The Kingdom is coming. It is not a noisy kingdom, bludgeoning its way into mankind. It is the quiet Kingdom of the one of whom Isaiah said ‘He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench.

For yourself, think of it this way: think of one of those modern torches that does not need a battery because it produces light when you give a handle a turn or two. It never runs out and leaves you in the dark provided you do not neglect to give that handle a turn or two very frequently. So it is with the light of Jesus – provided you do not neglect to keep in contact with him through the Spirit at regular intervals through prayer, meditation, Bible reading and meeting in fellowship. Jesus may be the light of the world but he is also our light, your light, my light. John goes on to say we will not walk in darkness but have the light of life.

Walk in the light of Jesus; avoid the darkness.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 33

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 33 - John 8:7
Throwing stones

There are problems with the first 11 verses of chapter 8 indicated in most Bibles by using a different print. The experts reckon that it was not written by John, mainly because some of the words used are quite different from the rest of this Gospel, but common in the others, and many of the oldest manuscripts have put it somewhere else, either in this gospel or even one of the others.

But it has all the marks of being a genuine fragment about an episode in the life of Jesus, and it is part of the New Testament we have been given so we should treat it as scripture. It is one of the best known events in the life of Jesus. So much so that there are many popular sayings about ‘throwing the first stone’. Unfortunately most of the comments on it mistake the true focus of the account which is neither that sexual sin is not as important as many people think nor that the guardians of morality can be very hypocritical, and that the pursuit of a self-righteous judgement is wrong. The true focus is on Jesus – as usual in the Gospels – his attitudes, his actions and his words.

The local guardians of morality had set up the whole scene but there were several mistakes in what they did. The woman and her partner should have been warned that their action was wrong, not acceptable, and could lead to death sentences. We are not told that this had happened. There should have been witnesses, at least two of them, to verify that she had been caught in the act of intercourse. Circumstantial evidence, such as that she had been seen coming out of a small room with a man, was not enough. Also, perhaps most important, where was the man? Under the Judaic law both partners had to be produced and punished equally (Leviticus 20: 10).

The clear intention was to trap Jesus into doing or saying something that would enable them to accuse him of blasphemy. Even the fact that this what they were trying to do this way is interesting. Jesus must have had a reputation of being a ‘soft touch’ who would prefer to treat the woman lightly rather than apply the full rigor of the law to her.

The way that Jesus dealt with this very difficult situation is almost unbelievably clever. He said nothing. He wrote in the sand on the ground. What he wrote we have no way of knowing. There have been many guesses down through the ages but none of them are any more than that – guesses. Very possibly it was a significant act in their culture that was saying something like ‘I do not agree with your actions and I am deliberately not going to answer because what you have done is wrong’.

When they attempted to get him to say something he looks up and says the famous words “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Then he stoops down again to write, perhaps so that the accusers knew he was not watching them and accusing them individually.

A new world had come, a new world had broken in, and the ways of this new world, the Kingdom of God, were crucially different. This new world was focused on people’s futures, not their pasts. Jesus does no more than recognize that she had been living a life of sin before saying the positive thing “go now and leave your life of sin”. That was his usual habit. He would acknowledge that someone had sinned – haven’t we all – but then move them on with a positive action or exhortation to live differently in the future. He did that for the woman at the well by telling her who he was, and that propelled her into a life of witness and a future we can only imagine. When Jesus met up again with the man he had cured by the pool of Bethesda he tells him to stop sinning so that his future would be brighter. Zacchaeus might seem to be the exception but he decided to make restitution, it was not anything Jesus told him to do.

Of course, when you stop and think about it this had to be the way it happened. Jesus brought a message of forgiveness and grace. What he offered was always free grace, wonderful grace, grace demanding only belief and consecration. So there was never any place for spending time working out, puzzling, agonizing, over what anyone, including you and me, have to do by way of restitution before entering the Kingdom. No, the past is the past. The Lord has forgiven and forgotten our pasts. We may find it hard to forget our own pasts. Even those of us with normally bad memories may find there are things in our pasts we cannot forget! But we are to try to do so.

We start the Christian life with a clean sheet of paper and a book with nothing written in it. That is the wonderful way of the Kingdom. We, with the help of the Holy Spirit, are given the responsibility to write only good things in our book of life. It is as if the old pages, recording what we did before we decided to follow Jesus, have been stuck together so no one can read them any more. Even when the Lord himself picks up the book of our life on the great final day those pages will be stuck together; he will only read the unstuck pages. Isn’t that wonderful!

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 32

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 32 - John 7:37-38
Living Water

When I was in a youth group in Scotland (a long time ago) we use to sing in what we hoped was a broad Scots dialect ‘I’m as blithe as blithe can be, Ma bickers fu’ an’ skailin o’er’. If you can work out what that means you should get a prize! It is in fact ‘I’m as joyful as can be, My beaker (cup) is full and slopping over’. It was based on the line in Psalm 23 ‘my cup runs over’ rather than what Jesus says here “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me rivers of living water will flow from within them” but it expresses the idea behind what Jesus said perfectly.

It was the last day of the festival of Tabernacles, a kind of harvest festival celebrating the end of the growing season and the last of the harvests. It included both lights (of which more in the next gem but one) and water. Huge pans of water were taken through the city in processions – 5 times on this last day. This was a visual prayer for the rains to come. Their harvest was at the end of a very dry season with no rain at all. To someone living in the UK a very dry season sounds like a very good idea as we have too much of the wet stuff anyway. But many of you living in other parts of the world will have a much better appreciation of how important it is to get rain at the time of the year when you expect to get rain.

Jesus stands up and shouts out these words. There is some doubt about what exactly he meant, hence the alternative reading in a footnote of the NIV, but the overall message is clear - anyone who believes in him will become the source of great riches, both to himself or herself, and to other people. Those riches, John points out in the next verse, consist of the possession of the Holy Spirit, though not quite the Holy Spirit as he later became available to all those who believed in Jesus after Pentecost. But Jesus is part of the Triune God, as is the Holy Spirit, so participating in him by believing in him was not much different from having the Spirit.

Jesus is using another vivid metaphor to explain who he is and what he brought to the people who met him. They, like all of us, were spiritually thirsty. They wanted purpose to life; they wanted to know that there is a supreme God in control of this world; they wanted to know of a source of strength they could draw on when not everything was going right for them; they wanted to have the understanding that this life is not all there is – there is something good to come later. All that is thirst, so Jesus stands up and promises them living water, running water, spring water, clean water, the sort of water it is a delight to drink.

When people get this water, this Spirit, they will not be able to keep it to themselves. It will slop over, sometimes accidentally but also sometimes when we mean it to for someone else’s enjoyment.

The result of his words was chaos. Some thought he must be the prophet that Moses said would be ‘like me’ (Deuteronomy 18: 15); others thought he must be the long looked for Messiah; still others reckoned his background wasn’t good enough for either; the leading men wanted to put him safely behind bars but discovered they couldn’t get anyone to arrest him.

What a wonderful and amazing man he was. To all those who thirst – no other qualification required - he promised riches, the true riches of a fulfilling life, not gold – and we know that he fulfilled that promise - and what he got was chaos. So it is with us - we can choose – either a full and rich life following him or a world of chaos.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 31

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 31 - John 7:24
Decision time

“Stop judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly,” said Jesus. Or perhaps approximately ‘make up your mind - follow me or don’t follow me!’

Our acquaintance with decision-making will vary enormously according to where we live. I remember visiting our son and his family in a Central Asian city. They wanted to buy a small bicycle for their son. Eventually they found one after a long search. There was no decision to make – it was this or nothing. I also remember a grown woman who had been living in an African city telling us that she had come home to the UK, gone into a supermarket, burst into tears and rushed out. The degree of choice was too overwhelming for her to take.

You are going to have to listen to, or read, what follows very much according to your background. Jesus was telling his hearers to decide whether what he was saying and doing made sense, in which case they should follow him, or not, in which case they should not. That was, and is, the biggest decision anyone ever has to make for it determines the whole course of one’s life from there on forever.
Rather strangely this is most difficult for those of us who live in a part of the world where there is a huge choice in the supermarkets. We are too used to making decisions and then changing them for another one next week. We live in a consumer society so we too easily act as consumers over everything, including whether or not we should follow Jesus. Then, if it doesn’t suit us because the church meets at the time we want to play football – or something, next week we will give up on following Jesus and do something else.

It may well be that our life is a chaos of conflicting events. But then so is this chapter. It is easily the most chaotic chapter in this Gospel so far. Jesus starts off in Galilee, goes up to Jerusalem late for the festival, has to dodge the authorities, and then challenges his hearers over his latest miracle in Jerusalem. That is: when he healed the man at the pool of Bethesda on a Sabbath. It was that last event which lead to this direct challenge to decide whether what he did, and the way he justified what he did, meant that they should not judge him on the basis of the rules and regulations but on the basis of the effects of what he did. Effects which included not just an infringement of the rules but accepting that he stood above the rules because he was the Messiah, the chosen one of God.

In a way this seems a lot to base on this one incident, but no doubt they would have heard something of what he had been doing in Galilee, both the miracles that John has recorded and the many healings he had carried out that the other Gospels tell us more about.

Jesus tells us not to judge by mere appearances, but to think carefully what we are doing first so that we make good decisions. That is good advice for anything and everything we have to decide about. Unfortunately it is not the way we tend to act. The whole advertising industry relies on our inability to make wise choices, but to go by appearances.

What about you? And what about your decisions for or against Jesus? Those decisions are fundamentally different from all the others you can ever make in life because they are two-way decisions. The Holy Spirit comes into them as well. In his goodness and his graciousness the Lord God has allowed us to think that we make the decision to follow Jesus, in much the same way as we decide all the other things of life. But hidden behind our decision is the work of God the Holy Spirit calling us to follow Jesus. As we have noticed before those two things don’t logically add up but they are nonetheless real for that.

Have you decided to follow Jesus? Or, should I rather ask whether the Holy Spirit has called you to follow Jesus?

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 30

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 30 - John 6:53
Food and drink

In the last few verses of this long statement of Jesus John suddenly adds the drinking of blood to the idea of eating the flesh of Jesus. We may well ask – why did he do that? We cannot be sure that all this is something Jesus said in one connected speech. In verse 25 he seems to be at the side of the sea, in verse 59 he is in the synagogue. So these verses from 53 to 58 may be something he said on a different occasion. The big question, over which the experts argue and differ, is whether these verses are about the Lord’s Supper (also called the Eucharist, Communion service or Breaking of Bread, etc.) or not. I think they are. John has chosen not to tell us about the last supper eaten in the upper room, but has put this short section of something Jesus said in instead. Which, of course, raises the very important question – why did he do that? What are the different things this section teaches us about the Lord’s Supper which we might not get from the more straightforward accounts in the other 3 gospels?

There are 2 in particular. They both relate very sharply to the practice of many churches as to how they do the Lord’s Supper. First is about what it means. Following the phrase ‘do this in remembrance of me’ in Luke’s gospel, repeated in Paul’s instruction to the church in Corinth, many churches, taking that very literally, insist that their celebration of the Lord’s Supper is just that and only that – a memorial feast. It is a good guess that this is what was happening in the church that John was associated with 50 plus years later. So, rather than repeating this well known instruction, he puts in these words. He is saying – no – there is more to it than that. When you partake of the bread and the cup you are coming much closer to Jesus. You are becoming part of him, as near as can be. We think of a good marriage as one where the phrase ‘the two become one flesh’ has become a reality. John is here saying that is the sort of way we are to relate to Jesus. We are to become ‘one flesh’, ‘one blood’. That is a hard metaphor, hard to live up to that is, but we need to realize that is the challenge that John puts before us.

Being a bookish person I think of it this way: as I can be excited, enthralled, enthused, changed by a really good book, or a passage in a book, so I should react to partaking in the Lord’s supper. And I find that difficult. The words in the book have challenged me, gone into my mind and my memory store. The flesh and the blood of Jesus are indeed a word, because he is the Word of God but it is still hard to lay hold of such simple things as bread and cup with the same intensity. Perhaps that is just me and you find it better and easier – I hope that is the case.

Second is about how the meal is to be carried out. One might think - many churches do - that because it was only the apostles that were present at that first meal the people involved in leading the service should be special. Rather sadly some denominations even call them priests. A priest is someone who stands between the ordinary worshipper and God. Therefore they are special. But there is no sign of any particular person leading the feast in this passage. There are no priests in the New Testament except ALL the Lord’s people. We all have immediate access to the Lord through the Spirit. Did John mean by the way he phrases it that it could be anyone of the Lord’s people who broke the bread and poured out the from the cup? I think he does and in doing so he was reflecting what Jesus meant. The other 3 gospel writers all say that when the 5000+ were fed it was the disciples who distributed the food. John says simply ‘Jesus distributed …’. No intermediaries are mentioned.

I was horrified when I heard a Christian woman, a missionary in a remote part of Africa, say they had been unable to Break Bread in their little meeting because there were no male converts. What rubbish! Nowhere does the New Testament even begin to hint that it is necessary to have a man, or an ordained man, or a priest to be able to partake of the body and blood of our Lord. Jesus set this feast up in the simplest possible way – we should not complicate matters.

Of course, very sadly, this service has been one of the main causes of disagreement in the worldwide church. Paul, who got so upset when Peter started to say some people can come to this table and these others cannot because of their ethnic background, would be horrified when churches today say some can come to our celebration because they share our particular viewpoint but others cannot because they belong to a church with a different name and different practices. Consequently there are as many individual views as churches on what is right and what is wrong. Hence the above comments must be said to be my view, heavily influenced by my particular background (Baptist/Christian Brethren/evangelical).

Think about all this – carefully. Accept these views or reject them as you think fit. What you do will very likely depend on your background. It is no good bringing the ‘leading of the Holy Spirit’ into your thoughts because he seems much less concerned than we are by all the differences!

This is a wonderful passage that should send us to our knees not to our debating chamber!

One modern song captures the most important things about this passage rather nicely. Here it is:

So we share in the bread of life / And we drink of his sacrifice /

As a sign of our bonds of love / Around the table of the King.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 29

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 29 - John 6:51
Living Bread

Three times Jesus announces that he is the bread of life. This is a somewhat strange thing to do, particularly when he goes on to tell his disciples to ‘eat my flesh and drink my blood’. We will need to think about 1) why he does this, 2) what are the Old Testament ideas he is referring to, and 3) what does he mean by eating bread when he has just equated himself with bread.

First, why does he do this? This is the first of the 7 ‘I AM’s with a ‘something following’ with which John has so carefully structured his Gospel. We have already seen how there are 7 occasions on which he reports Jesus referring to himself as I AM and how that was the personal name of God given to Moses at the burning bush. These 7 I AMs with a ‘something following’, better known than the others perhaps, though possibly not as important, also declare the importance and divinity of Jesus in no uncertain fashion and that emphasis is the clear motive of John in including them in his Gospel. So this is the first in an enormously important sequence of statements.

Bread was more widely eaten in those days than it is now and formed the basic source of nourishment for most people. This was particularly true of the Biblical area, which does not get enough rain to grow rice. Bread is not eaten proportionately so much these days because of the wider diet of the more affluent countries, and the large areas of Asia that grow and eat rice. When Jesus said I am the bread of life he was laying claim to a complete and fundamental part of people’s intake using the image of the physical necessity to point to a spiritual need, often overlooked but just as necessary to live a truly full life.

Of course, what he said was misunderstood, which is quite understandable since it sounds as though he was suggesting cannibalism. That misunderstanding reverberated down through the history of the church. It was centuries before people stopped making that an excuse for persecuting Christians.

Secondly: there are at least 2 Old Testament ideas that are in the background in this chapter. The most obvious is when the Israelites were given manna as they travelled through the wilderness (Exodus 16). This, together with quail (a small game bird eaten for food), rescued them from starvation when they were running out of food 15 days after they left Egypt. The story includes a great deal of grumbling on their part, first about the lack of food, then the inadequacies of a quail and manna diet. That grumbling is repeated in this episode but now it is grumbling at Jesus because of what he said: “I came down from heaven” which did not square with what they knew about his background as the son of Joseph (so they thought) and Mary.

Because the miracle of Jesus feeding the 5000 did not clearly include a heavenly angle and only lasted for one day rather than the 40 years the manna came down they did not consider it as impressive. Jesus, however, pointed out that the manna came not from Moses but the Lord God. The bread they had just had came from him – implying that he was on the same level as God himself.

The other Old Testament passage they may have been thinking of was Isaiah 55: 1-2 which reads “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare” which then goes on to 55: 10-11 which say “As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.” Those verses give a clear linkage between ‘bread’ and the ‘word of God’, precisely what Jesus is connecting up in himself when he said, “For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me.”

Putting those thoughts together makes clear what he meant when he talked about eating bread and his flesh as bread. He came down from heaven as did the manna but he was vastly superior to the manna because he was the very Word of God. That in turn takes us right back to the very first verse of the Gospel. Jesus was the Word of God. We are to ‘eat’ that word taking him, his ideas, his thoughts, his teachings, into our very beings. And, because we are human beings, that means listening to words and hearing them and putting them into practice.

The repeated call of the New Testament that we should be in close identification with Jesus (‘I am with you always’; ‘united with him’; ‘transformed into his image’; ‘when Christ appears we shall be like him’) in practical terms means to be like him in what we say, our words, what we do, our actions, and what we are, our motives and attitudes. We will never completely succeed for we are human and he was and is both human and divine, but the path ahead of us is clear: walk in step with Jesus.<

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 28

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 28 - John6:36-40
Security

I set out to do this series basically about one verse at a time but here we have a small structure that, being a lover of structures, I must bring to your attention. It is what is called officially a chiasm, but I prefer to call it a reflection for reasons that should become obvious. It is a series of clauses which go ABCB’A’, the second part being a reflection of the first half with some significant changes. Such things are surprisingly common throughout both the Old and the New Testaments. This one goes:

• Verse 36 A you have seen me and still you do not believe
• 37 B All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away
• 38 C For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me.
• 39 B’ I shall lose none of all those he has given me, but raise them up at the last day.
• 40 A’ everyone who looks to the Son and believes … I will raise them up at the last day

The 2 outer verses are about seeing and believing – the first negatively, they see and do not believe, the last positively about those who see and do believe. The 2 inner verses are both about what happens to those that the Father has given to Jesus. The central verse explains why Jesus has come down to earth and the consequences, which are that the last 2 verses are both more positive than the first 2.

We cannot see Jesus in any literal sense as they could and the first verse therefore does not make any direct sense to us. But I think we can reasonably change it into the parallel idea of listening and hearing and get the sense that way. You most probably know someone who is very good at listening but doesn’t seem to hear anything much! You talk to them; they give every appearance of agreeing with you; you are sure you have convinced them that what you are saying is right – perhaps some change in the way things are done at work or in church, which they are in a position to make.

But then you discover that absolutely nothing changes. They listened, but they did not hear. So it can be with the way people fail to hear what they are told about Jesus. They read the Bible; they attend church regularly; they enjoy the fellowship; there are all the signs that they are Christians. But nothing really changes in the way they behave; the things they do; the statements they make about faith. They listened but they did not hear, in exactly the same way as the people Jesus was talking to could see him, listen to him, see what he did, but it all made no change in their lives. Be careful. I do hope you are not one of those people who go to a good church to get their regular dose of listening but never really hear anything!

In his second and second last statements Jesus moves on to say that the reason for this is that it is the work of the Father to select those who will truly hear Jesus and follow him. That is both a reason and a promise. If indeed we have set out to follow Jesus we are secure for it was not really our choice but the work of the Father. That does not mean that we do not choose to follow or not. Later on in this chapter we read that many of those who listened to Jesus ‘turned back’. They decided not to follow him. And that is the way it is. From our perspective it is something that we do; from the greater perspective of the Triune God it is something he does. And we shall never be able to make those 2 perspectives meet up and sound the same. Like many of the best things of life: the love of a man and a woman, the things we see beauty in, the joy we can get from many an apparently trivial pursuit; the step of faith is not entirely logical – and none the worse for that.

The second last verse in this structure points out that the true benefit of that is that we are held securely in the Father’s arms and cannot be lost. (Although being frail human beings we always have the potential to walk away ourselves, as most of those listening to Jesus on this occasion seem to have done.) Not only shall we not be driven away in the first place, we are securely in forever, for this life and for the life to come. WOW!

The most important verse is, as usual in these reflective structures, the middle one. All this is possible because Jesus came down to do the will of the Father. We are totally secure in him. Triple WOW!

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 27

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 27: John 6:29
The work of God in us

Jesus was asked by the crowd, “What must we do to do the works God requires?” They were not starting from the same place we start from. They were Jews; they were already the people of God – or so they thought. They had not realized that the presence of Messiah Jesus meant that things had changed, completely and dramatically. The reply of Jesus relates to that huge change. John did not tell us what Jesus had been talking about on the other side of the lake but we can easily guess. Mark reports his words on another occasion as, “The time has come. The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news.” And we may safely assume he did not say anything very different this time.

They thought they would be automatically transferred into his Kingdom. “No!” says Jesus. You need to do something - you need to take a positive step into the Kingdom by following me, so his answer was, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”

But we need to be careful here. It sounds almost as though Jesus is saying ‘believing in me, that is that I am the Messiah and the Son of God, is all you have to do step into the Kingdom’; or, as he said to Nicodemus, ‘be sure you are born again’ and that is all that matters. But it is not so. You cannot just step into the Kingdom and find a nice seat on a wall or something and watch what happens. You cannot just be born again and stay in the cradle, drink your milk and get your diaper changed for you. You must grow. You don’t have a choice; once you are born you have to grow. If you don’t you are severely retarded – and who wants to be that. If you are born again you are also equally born from above; the power of the Spirit has entered your life and you must grow – just as you cannot opt out of growing physically once you are born you cannot opt out of growing spiritually. And a major part of that is that if you are in the Kingdom you must participate in the work of the Kingdom.

All too often people assume, and are often told, that the first steps: being born again, making a decision for Jesus, giving your heart to Jesus, setting out to follow Jesus; is all that matters and they can now boast of what they have done and they will be ‘all right’ at the last day or when they die. It isn’t quite like that. Only the last way of talking about that first step ‘setting out to follow Jesus’ carries any suggestion that there is work to be done. But there is! Paul says (in Philippians 2: 12, 13), “Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.”

And that is just a bit fuller than what Jesus says here, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”

What Paul says is both a promise and a challenge. It is the great promise that God will be in us and undertake the work. The challenge is that we are to work hard ourselves – to be better people, to relate better to and help other people, to spread the Good News of the Kingdom to other people, etc. And we need to be careful about how we do it – particularly that last one about how we handle the Good News. Paul says, referring to the work that he was doing in spreading the Good News and teaching people in the young churches about it, “By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as a wise builder. Each one should build with care. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work. If what has been built survives, the builder will receive a reward. If it is burned up, the builder will suffer loss but yet will be saved—even though only as one escaping through the flames.” If we do anything about the Good News, as we all should and must, we must realize our responsibility in making sure it is the real Good News and not some distorted version of it.

We are in the Lord’s army. Not to fight, but to build. Work hard, work well, build straight and high and we shall meet in that grand final day when all is revealed and we will receive the great reward of all our work – being ushered into the immediate presence of the Lord Jesus to hear his ‘well done, good and faithful servant’.

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