Partakers Christian Podcasts

Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 63

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 63 - John 14:26b

Authority?

Authority is a dirty word in modern Western culture. Philosophers and other opinion formers seem to have convinced people that anybody claiming any sort of authority over them is only in it for their own good and are trying to establish an undesirable level of control over them and anybody else who falls within their grasp. Perhaps. But then those parts of the world which try to reject that sort of thinking are almost invariably corrupt and corruption stems from a rejection of lawful authority. So we have to conclude that mankind always needs authority, in the form of laws and lawful government, and always wants to reject it.

The disciples, and particularly the apostles had lived with matchless authority as they had walked and lived with Jesus as their Master and Teacher. We too, if we have set out to follow Jesus have accepted that his teaching will be the prime authority over us. The big question before those original disciples and now before us is: what did Jesus say about continuing authority after he left this earth? The answer is clear: the Holy Spirit would replace him. What is a great deal less clear is how that authority, coming from an invisible source, is to be conveyed to the people of God.

He said: “the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.” And, in the chapter 16, “when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you.” Fine – but how were they to hear what he said?

Similarly we read about ‘walking in step with the Spirit’ but have the same problem. How do we walk in step with someone who is invisible?

Most of the answer is in this wonderful book – the Bible. John started his gospel by saying that Jesus is the Word. Teaching, in the sense in which Jesus taught, is always about words. It is not about drawing pretty pictures, or making things as primary school children will do. It is not about excitement or floods of emotion, as many people seem to think these days. It is not, dare I add, about the things we see and hear on our electronic devices these days. Knowing what we should do as Christian believers is about words, which is tough for those who cannot read and can only listen to those who can. I was amazed and shocked in Pakistan that when I asked a village pastor whether they taught their illiterate people to learn scripture by heart the answer was that they didn’t. They certainly should have done.

The function of the Spirit is to teach the things that Jesus had taught. But Jesus said more than that – he added an AND. He also said that “ and he, the Holy Spirit, will remind you of everything that I have said to you”. What he most probably meant is that we have to not only learn the things that he taught but interpret them, and apply, them to our very different cultures.

That is easy for me to write down and say but very difficult to put into practice. In our church we sing next to nothing but the latest songs and use a 5 year old translation of the Bible. A church 2 miles away boast that they only sing the Psalms, at least 1500 years old, and use a translation of the Bible made 400 years ago. Who is right? We fit into the modern culture; they stick to old, tried and well validated ways. Are we both right? There is material for a good argument there!

We do not read that Jesus taught people to speak in tongues or fall over when he spoke to them or many of the other things that have come into the modern church. Therefore those who teach such things may not be teaching from the Holy Spirit of God. Since it is clear from the epistles that such things were done in the early church and are now enshrined in our reliable scriptures they are not totally forbidden, but the main emphasis of our practice in the church should always be on the basic teachings of Jesus, our one and only Lord, Master and Teacher.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 62

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 62 - John 14:26

The Holy Spirit

God had a problem! ! ! Jesus was going to die within the week and after his resurrection would return to heaven to support his people. How, then, could the work that he had done so successfully on earth: teaching people how to relate to the Father God, helping them to deepen their spiritual lives, healing the ill, challenging the faithful and generally helping those who need help be carried on?

His solution was to widen the range of action of the Holy Spirit. In Old Testament days the Spirit’s activity had been mostly restricted to the leaders of the people; people like Moses, David and Isaiah though there had always been the hope that there would be a general outpouring. Joel had reported that the Lord said, “I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions” (2: 28). Now the Lord was going to make that true. All the Lord’s people would be given the indwelling Holy Spirit whose role would be to replace Jesus in the life of those who had actually known him and to stand in for Jesus in every detail in the life of subsequent disciples. It is that replacement function that John emphasises in his account of what Jesus said. John’s emphasis is different from that of the other New Testament writers who are more concerned with the outward signs of the presence of the Spirit. Neither he nor they are wrong. The two aspects of the truth about the Holy Spirit and what he does in our lives are complementary. We need to always look for both of them.

John reports Jesus said, “the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you”. That is the second time Jesus has mentioned the Holy Spirit in this discourse. The first time he called him the Spirit of Truth (14: 16, 17). He will refer to him as the Advocate twice more at 15: 26 and 16: 7. The word translated as Advocate in the NIV and the NRSV must be one of the most difficult words there is to find an English equivalent of the original Greek word which was ‘paraclete’. The previous NIV had ‘Counsellor’; the old King James version had ‘Comforter’; the Message paraphrase has ‘Friend’ and the Good News Bible, the American NASB and the English Standard Version all have ‘Helper’. Probably something like ‘called alongside to help and advise’ would cover all, or most, of the meanings but that is too much of a mouthful to be used as a translation. The most basic meaning is ‘Helper’ but that misses the idea of advisor, or any sort of legal role as the use of ‘Advocate’ and ‘Counsellor’ suggest, which is also present in the Greek word.

Which word should we use? Probably the best advice is – all of them. But even then one will miss the idea that is the most dominant in the sentences that contain the word. We have: ‘the Spirit of truth’; ‘will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.’; ‘Father—he will testify about me.’; ‘he will prove the world to be in the wrong … ‘ and then these are followed by the statement that when ‘he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you.’ All of which refer in some way or another to knowledge and wisdom.

You are clearly looking for knowledge about Jesus and the Spirit. Why else would you be looking at this Partakers site? Good on you! Keep it up! We can never learn too much about our Saviour and the whole plan of salvation. Of course learning facts must not be the end of the matter. We must always seek to put them into practice. That is how we shall walk hand-in-hand with Jesus. He will be our teacher.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 61

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 61 - John 14:18
Not orphans

Jesus promises his disciples he will not leave then as orphans. He will come back again. The obvious question is ‘when’. It is not easy to see when he was referring to. Perhaps he was deliberately making this general statement so that we could fill in the details.

If so – here goes. The 4 letters RSVP are well known in the English speaking world although they come not from English but from French. They stand for “Repondais S’il Vous Plait” (I can’t get the accents on my keyboard) which means ‘Respond if you please’ or just ‘Please reply’. They often appear at the bottom of a formal invitation to events like a party or a wedding. It has been suggested that we can use these very familiar letters to remind us of the ways in which Jesus will return. R=Resurrection, S=Spirit, V=Visits and P=Parousia. Let’s take them one at a time.

R=Resurrection. Jesus was actually speaking to his disciples and this was, of course, before his death and resurrection so it was a very meaningful promise for them. We have to look back to it but it is a no less meaningful moment for us. Everything that we are and have in Jesus stems from that great event. Without it we would be, as Paul said, “most to be pitied”, by which I think he meant that we would have been expending a great deal of energy on something that was not true.

S=Spirit. In a very real sense Jesus came back at Pentecost when the Holy Spirit descended on the followers of Jesus gathered in Jerusalem. After all Christ and the Spirit were both parts of the One True God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. A huge dynamism descended on all those involved that day. They were no longer orphans. They now knew they were adopted members of a great family, which is now world-wide, the greatest and biggest in the world of which we are part. We can think of ourselves as walking in step with the Spirit, or walking in step with Jesus. Make your choice, or consider yourself involved with both, perhaps one in one hand and the other in the other. I leave you to work out which is which side!

V=Visits. Again and again Jesus visits us in the events of our lives. He is with us in our great joys and our deepest sorrows. He is with us in the smaller things of life. How aware of that in the day-by-day events of your life will depend on your personality and, perhaps, in how busy you are. In the days when I drove a tractor for a living I was very aware of his continuous presence with me because my mind was scarcely engaged with what I was doing. When I became a teacher with a room full of 14-year olds I was much less conscious of his presence even although I needed it more. But that didn’t matter – I might have lost touch with him from my end of the relationship but I knew, when I could afford to stop and think about it, that he was still strongly in touch with me so the relationship was as strong, or stronger, than ever. Exactly the same goes for you.

P=Parousia. Parousia is the Greek word meaning ‘arrival and presence’ which is commonly translated in the New Testament as ‘coming’, usually referring to the Second Coming of Jesus. So, for instance, the word behind 1 Thessalonians 4: 15 - 17 which talks about ‘the coming of the Lord’ is ‘parousia’ and the next verse goes on to talk about ‘the Lord will come down from heaven’ so there can be no possible doubt that this word is being used about the return of our Lord Jesus to this earth of ours. We call this the Second Coming.

How exactly it will all work out we shall never know until it happens. Some bold people, whose boldness outstrips their wisdom, will tell you exactly what is going to happen. They have our Lord’s schedule all worked out for him! But they do not all agree, and surely the Spirit does not disagree with himself so they do not have the Spirit teaching them. The only sure things about the Second Coming are that it will catch us all by surprise and confound all our prophecies – just as his first coming did – and exceed all our expectations for exciting wonder and worship.

This was our glorious Lord’s promise to his original disciples and therefore to us: RSVP. That originally meant ‘please reply’. Sure, Lord, we reply with praise and wonder. Living in the certainty of your Resurrection; rejoicing that we too have received your Spirit; full of thanksgiving for those times when we have been aware that you are Visiting us in a special way; looking forward with eager expectation to your Parousia, your Return. Even so ‘come, Lord Jesus.’

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 60

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 60 - John 14:12
Greater works

Jesus goes on after his great statement that he is ‘the way, the truth and the life” to say that his disciples will do even greater things than he did, which is a quite astonishing thing to say. We have to ask - did he mean it in terms of quality or of quantity or what? It is easy to see that in most particulars we can indeed do more things that Jesus did because there are so many more of us. About quality we may well be much more doubtful.

What Jesus did he listed in Matt 11:5 as “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor”.

So far as the first four are concerned – yes, we can do more than Jesus did. Modern medicine has replaced miracle working in these cases. As a friend reported that the surgeon said to him as he was about to operate on a very serious wound “with my skill and the Lord’s help we will see what we can do”. We no longer expect that the miraculous will be necessary in most cases. On the comparatively rare occasions when it does occur we should be glad and rejoice.

There were a few hospitals in the ancient pre-Christian world but not many and not very effective either. They mostly made things as comfortable as possible for the dying. That was all that they could do. It was the Medieval Christian hospitals and the development of the realisation that it was possible to apply the ideas of scientific thinking to questions of health which started the developments which are so good today in the matters of health.

But Jesus did not stop there. The thing he claimed that is obviously questionable today is “raised from the dead”. To a very limited extent doctors may indeed resuscitate those who ought to have died but that is not quite the same thing. Claims are made in some parts of the present day church that people are raised from the dead. Perhaps. Those of us who live in the post-Enlightenment Western part of the world will always be very doubtful of such things. Your reaction to the very suggestion will depends on where you live and what your church culture is. What we must be careful about is not claiming that we have all truth in such matters. We must rejoice in what we can now do by the great advances of modern medicine. We must be careful not to reject any of the good things we now have. Let us rejoice in them.

The last of the things Jesus listed as the works that he did is the most interesting one: “the good news is proclaimed to the poor”. There has been a greater explosion of Good News round all the world in the last 50 years than there has ever been before. But this is not so much an explosion of human activity as that of the Holy Spirit. Only the Holy Spirit can touch people’s hearts and minds with the true work of the Lord God. No one else can control his work, his action, his force. That is why Jesus said the reason greater things would be done was “because I am going to the Father”. And although that is most obviously a spiritual work, more obviously than curing blindness or lameness, all those things that help a human being are ultimately a work of God. Which is why Jesus goes on to say that he will do whatever we ask in his name. The things we ask for have to be things that fit in to the personality and purposes of our Lord – not just any old thing that we would like (a pile of gold coins would be very welcome, Lord!)

It is our good fortune to live in days when the Kingdom of God is expanding at an unprecedented rate (except for those few unhappy parts of the world where vicious and horribly misguided people are trying to wipe out Christian faith with the bullet and the bomb – they will never succeed). We have indeed been given access to ‘greater things’ than it has ever been the good fortune of any previous generation to have. Let us rejoice and make the maximum use of these great gifts that are ours.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 59

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 59 - John 14:10
Jesus and God

Between the three-fold I AM statement and one of the most amazing things Jesus ever said we have his remarkable statement of affinity with the Father in 14:10. He says, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” Once again we are back to the sort of statement that Westerners find so difficult because of their individualism. But to much of the rest of the world this is thoroughly understandable, including those parts of the world that try to argue that God has to be just one -arithmetically thinking. The God we worship is both the Father God and Jesus God (Before this chapter of the Gospel is finished we shall see that it also includes God the Holy Spirit, but we will leave him aside for the moment).

Undoubtedly the first Christians found that they wanted to worship Jesus and that raised the question of who was he?

Following Richard Bauckham – he says we should not worry about what a God was and is but should set about identifying who was and is God. ‘Who’ is more important than ‘what’. Identity is more important than substance and that seems to be a very important argument.

There were 2 supreme marks of God in Biblical thinking; 1) he was the Creator and 2) he is the Sovereign over all. Two things, apart from the person called God in the Old Testament, qualify on those criteria. They are the Word of God and the Wisdom of God. The Word of God was very active at the Creation. Everything was created because God ‘said’. Then in Psalm 104 we read that “How many are your works, Lord! In wisdom you made them all” and there are many similar statements in the book of Proverbs. Both Word and Wisdom were present at the Creation and were therefore part of God and greater than any angel or anything else.

Jesus fits very well into that sort of scheme. As we have seen John says in 1: 1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made … “, he was present at the Creation. Paul says in Philippians 2 “Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord.” Jesus is moving towards a position of sovereignty over all. He qualifies on both counts, he is Creator and Sovereign. He is part of the one God. God includes Jesus, which is exactly what John reports him saying in these verses: “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.”

When Paul wanted to talk about both God and Jesus he said something really astonishing in 1 Corinthians 8: 6. He said, “there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live”. If we strip out the sub-clauses we have ‘there is but one God, the Father; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ.” Every devout Jew said the Shema drawn from Deuteronomy 6: 4 “The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” twice a day to emphasize to themselves that there was only one God. Paul, a thoroughly orthodox Jew, has modified the Shema to include Jesus. He said, “there is one God, the Father; and there is one Lord, Jesus Christ”. There could be no clearer statement of how Jesus is included in the Godhead. There is one God whose name is ‘the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

One final thing we need to note. What does all this mean in terms of what God is like? Amazingly, astonishingly, it means that God the Father is and was a God who was prepared to stoop to wash the disciples feet, to be displayed before all the world hanging on a Cross, and to die for his people, for us! This is the sort of God we have – WOW!

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 58

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 58 - John 14:6b
the Exclusion clause

No sooner has Jesus said the greatest of all his I AM statements than he adds to it the clause “No one comes to the Father except through me.” Which is enough to make anyone writing about what he said to say ‘Ouch’ and wish he hadn’t! That is particularly the case if one is trying to write for people all round the world from many different cultures and backgrounds. For some (i) these words are not surprising or difficult; for some (ii) they constitute a direct challenge to the main culture and religion of the country and therefore spark instant, direct and obvious antagonism; for yet others (iii) they are a source of derision and indirect antagonism. In many ways the first two of those are easier to cope with than the last or at least easier to know what one should do. For the first nothing much needs to be said.

If, as in (ii) the antagonism is open, direct and obvious one does at least know where one stands and has to learn how to cope with the situation. I have recently seen a PhD thesis coming from one country where this is the case. The worrying conclusion of much of the research was that the major part of the resistance to the spread of the Good News was to be found in the church rather than from the surrounding antagonistic culture. Many, or most, in the church had become so defensive and reluctant to stand out against the surrounding culture, often unnecessarily so, that they constituted the main obstacle to the spread of the Gospel. Which is very sad. If you are caught in that sort of situation you need to look very carefully and prayerfully at what you do and don’t do. There is little I can say to help you in your case.

The major part of this comment is reserved for the third category I listed: the derision and indirect opposition common in the Western world. It is very hard to fight a jelly, and much of what happens in our world seems very like a jelly. It also needs some explanation, which I will now attempt.

Nearly 400 years ago a movement started amongst the philosophers and thinkers of Europe. They began to look for other foundations for their thinking than the Biblical scriptures. They reckoned they had found them in reason and rationality. Mankind they reckoned was able to work everything out for itself. They did not need any idea of a direct revelation from God to help them. At first they did not completely exclude God from their reckoning but turned him into an absentee God who had set the world going and then withdrawn from any active immediate involvement in it. But slowly and steadily the need for God has been downgraded until now it has virtually disappeared. The name give to this movement of thought is the Enlightenment, thus perpetrating the idea that this is light coming into a hitherto dark world. This line of thinking has been developed in the intervening centuries and still directs much of the thinking of the Western world. This is in spite of the fact that if there is no God who will eventually sit in judgement over the actions of men and women it releases them to follow their own line of thinking unhampered by such ideas. Unfortunately this has led to the excesses of the last century, Nazism and Communism, which have led to the deaths of untold millions of people in pursuit of ideas which have eventually failed to work. At a more personal and immediate level it has been necessary to find an arbiter for one’s actions. This has been found in the individual. Provided the individual does not adversely affect anybody else (and that is a very fluid and indefinite concept) they are free to do as they like. One of the most obvious examples of how this works out in practice is the modern attitudes to sex and marriage. Individualism says I will have a partner or a spouse for just as long as it suits me, no longer. Not even if it hurts my children or anyone else. I need to be the complete master of my own destiny. Of course, from time immemorial people have indulged in sex with others, whether they were supposed to or not. The difference now is that this is considered everyone’s right and promoted as the correct way to live.

How do we possibly cope with this sort of culture? On the one hand we live in the culture in which we live and we cannot escape it. On the other we have a distinctly different set of values, which constitute a culture, which is radically different. Any attempt to completely reject the surrounding culture normally and usually ends in disaster. We have to find a way to live in our surrounding culture and find a way to accept as much of it as does not contradict the clear Biblically promoted culture, particularly that of the New Testament. This is not easy. But we need to recognize that that is what is necessary and to tackle the task with prayer and determination.

Different churches have developed different outlooks on this task. Those who have tried to accommodate to the culture of the world the most have lost faith, members and momentum. We call them ‘liberal’ churches. Those who have tried hardest to stay Biblical in their thinking have survived better. We call them ‘Evangelical’ (not the same thing as being evangelistic which refers to efforts to spread the Gospel to as many people as possible).

This is in many ways an unsatisfactory comment on this important statement. But it touches on an important matter that we all, each, individually, have to work out and endeavour to live with and through.

May the Lord be with you as you do so.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 57

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 57 - John 14:6
the Way, the Truth and the Life

And so we come to what is arguably the greatest of all the I AM statements of Jesus. He said “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

We have 2 major problems here. The first is understanding the full force and the wonder of that first three-fold declaration; the second is knowing what to do with the following statement that seems to exclude all but us from access to the true God.

In this study we just consider the statement.

Being a Christian was commonly referred to as following the Way in the book of Acts (9: 2; 19: 9, 23; 22 ; 4; 24 ;14, 22). This is an interesting and important contrast to too much thinking in the present day church where great emphasis is sometimes put on the act of conversion. Starting is always important as is a wedding but in the end it is the marriage, the way in which the act of marriage is worked out over the years, which is far more important. So it is with faith. It is easy to overlook the statements about living well, such as “we will all stand before God’s judgment seat”, which is in Romans chapter 14 and is surrounded by too many comments about living well as Christians to quote. Paul told the folk in the church at Philippi “to work out your salvation”. That he went on to say “for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose” does not in any way reduce the force of his command.

The well known commentator Don Carson wrote some poetic lines on the subject. Here are some extracts from them:

I am the Way to God: I did not come
To light a path, to blaze a trail, that you
May simply follow in my tracks, pursue
My shadow like a prize that’s cheaply won. …..
My path takes in Gethsemane, the Cross,
And stark rejection draped in agony.
My way to God embraces utmost loss:
Your way to God is not my way, but me. …..

And so it is. When Jesus said ‘I AM the way’ he was reminding the disciples that it was in identity with him that they would get anywhere at all in their search for God and their endeavour to travel the same way as Jesus – which is what occasioned his statement in reply to the question of Thomas (v5). In a few moments he will go on to talk about how this can and will be done through the work of the Holy Spirit within the believer – but that is a topic for an other Gem.

For the moment he goes on to say that this will be done through truth and is the only way to a full and rewarding life.

To quote Carson again:
I am the Truth of God: I do not claim
I merely speak the truth, …..
The Triune God decided that the Word,
The self-expression of the Deity,
Would put on flesh and blood – and thus be heard.
The claim to speak the truth good men applaud.
I claim much more: I am the Truth of God.

The thought is very close to that of Wisdom, the Old Testament expression of the truth of God working in the believer to enable them to live a good and fulfilling life. Which thought takes us on to the third and last quote from Carson:

I am the Resurrection Life. …… I’m the drink
Of life. ….. By my triumph, I deal death to lusts and hates,
My life I now extend to men and women, …..
I’m the Resurrection and the Life.

Here only is full, true, satisfying life: following the Way of Jesus. That is the stunning claim that Jesus makes in these words. Not acceptable in many parts of the world in different ways as we shall see in the next Gem. Here is all the Good News about Jesus and our relationship to him in 9 words, only 5 of them of great significance, the others are but ‘the’ and ‘and’. Think of them often. Treasure them. Build them into your life.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 56

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 56 - John 14:1-3
Our final destination

Well perhaps not quite the final one – let me explain. But first the verses. Jesus said: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.”

Jesus is clearly talking about where we are eventually going. He recognizes that the apostles are a very troubled and worried bunch. They had expected a great event in which they would have been the heroes of their nation but, instead, it seems that Jesus actually expects to die and that they will be left in a leaderless state. Leaderless, that is, except for Peter and he doesn’t seem to have shown any great leadership abilities. He has been best at speaking out of turn and saying the wrong thing!

Jesus is now talking about ‘rooms’ or ‘dwelling places’ in his Father’s house, which is clearly in heaven. Sorry, but I don’t find that a very attractive image. It seems to suggest that we will all end up in a small bed-sitting room in some giant residential block like a student’s residence. Perhaps if Jesus had been talking in our 21st century he would have chosen a different picture to tell us what heaven will be like. I don’t know what you think of. My suggestion would be that he would have said something like ‘in my Father’s team there are many vacancies. There will be an active role for each and every one of you playing attack or defence as your abilities may suggest.’ That way we are talking of something active, outside and, above all, in the immediate presence of the team captain, Jesus.

Actually the idea of a near relationship to the Lord is included in the house and rooms image. In John’s Gospel the idea of close proximity with the Lord is sometimes included in the image of somewhere to live (‘he dwelt among us’, ‘building a temple’,’ the gate’). So the ‘place that Jesus will prepare’ is a place that will bring us into close relationship with the Father.

And where is this place? It really isn’t very clearly defined. It sounds as though it is in heaven but the unanimous opinion of the New Testament writers is that our final destination is not heaven but the New Earth. Thus Paul says “the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. … For the creation will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.” (Romans 8: 19, 21) Peter says “we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.” (2 Peter 3: 13) John of Patmos talks about seeing “a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. …. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God,” (Revelation 21: 1, 2).

All of which is very puzzling. The renewed earth seems in some remarkable way to be involved in our final destination, but so does heaven. One day we shall find out and our puzzles will all be resolved. We just mustn’t get too impatient.

For the moment we simply have to take to heart the clear intention of Jesus for his disciples and therefore for us. However troubled, anxious, frightened, worried or ill we may be we have the sure promise of the Lord that there is a future for us, that Jesus knows what it is even if we don’t, and he has prepared a place for us. Furthermore he will one day return, to us here on earth, or to us wherever we may be in the life after this one and that he will take us to that final destination where we shall be in close relationship to him, our Saviour, and to the Father who originally chose us, called us and acknowledged that we, you and I, are his people.

No one has a greater future than you have – if you are one of the people Jesus recognises as his!

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 55

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 55 - John 13:15

The example of Jesus

Now we come to the statement of Jesus that “I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.” That is the part of this whole episode of the foot-washing which is most often emphasized. But we must not think of this as a general statement about following his example without considering what he has just said about our relationship with him, explained through the picture of washing.

Peter spoke up asking Jesus not just to wash his feet but his whole body. By doing so he showed that he had completely misunderstood what Jesus was doing. Jesus was not doing anything with water, as water, but using it as a picture of the relationship that the disciples were to have with him. This had been established once and for all in the event pictured by baptism. As we noted in the last study the bond between Jesus and the disciples was to be very tight. In the first few verses of chapter 15, the next chapter but one, he would use the picture of a vine tree and its branches to illustrate what he meant. He would then go on to explain how this was to work through the effect of the Holy Spirit. This event is all about relationship.

Jesus goes on, having said that they had all had a bath – a complete washing - to say that they did not need another one. In fact if they tried to insist on one they would downgrade the significance of the first one entirely. Sadly some branches of the Christian church do just that when they teach about a ‘second blessing’. There is only one blessing of conversion. It comes once; it signals entry into the Kingdom, it includes the once-for-all gift of the Holy Spirit; it cannot be repeated.

Jesus does talk about a need to ‘only wash feet’ (though this phrase is disputed as perhaps being a late addition). If accepted it may well be a reference to the Lord’s Supper. We are to be baptized once, but participate in the Supper many times.

Jesus then goes on to say that he has set them an example that they should copy. Not copy with water but with the depth of their relationships within the people of God, which is a much more difficult thing. Churches, communities of the Lord’s people, are never entirely free of inter personal strife. In fact they often seem to have more than their fair share of it. Because people have committed themselves to something - or rather somebody - very deeply they feel much more concerned than they are with their more superficial attachments. Our everyday work lives are controlled by the amount we are paid for what we do. That is a much less significant bond than our faith commitment. So people will tend to be far more upset if things don’t go the way they think they should go in church than in the office or the workshop. But the people we are with in church are more than work colleagues – they are our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Have you ever stopped and looked round your local gathering on a Sunday morning and said to yourself something like, ‘these are the Lord’s people; these are my brothers and sisters; these are the people I am to be in closest relationship to, at least outside my immediate family.’ It can be a sobering thought: that cantankerous old so and so, the woman that has an acid tongue that pulls everyone down, that young fellow who makes a speciality of annoying everybody, etc. Jesus knelt down and washed the feet of people like those – indeed of one who was shortly to betray him and consign him to a cruel death. That was the example he set. “you should do as I have done for you” he said.

It can be hard to walk in the Way of the Lord given the sort of people we may have as family! It is a good job that we have the Holy Spirit, the comforter, the advocate, that Jesus is going to talk about so much in the next 3 chapters, to help us. Thank you, Lord.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 54

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 54 - John 13:1
Foot washing –Jesus and us

“Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”

In this very striking and well-known episode Jesus washes the feet of the disciples. This story says some very significant things about Jesus, and therefore about God, and also gives some very specific instructions to his disciples and the church down through the ages. We will look at the first of these in this study and the second in the next one.

What Jesus did constitutes a visual comment on what Paul said in Philippians 2: 6 – 11, that is:

“Jesus, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Jesus came from heaven down to this earth. He existed before he took on human form as a baby in Bethlehem; he was already the Son of God, joint creator of all that is. “Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God”. He chose to suppress all those things that were part of his divine nature. So we see in this passage that he did not know that Judas would betray him when he chose him as one of his 12 disciples. It was his ability as a man to read the thoughts and intents of the people round about him that enabled him to see what Judas was going to do.

What Jesus proceeded to do is quite extraordinary. Presumably the evening meal that was in progress was a very private affair; so private that there were no servants present in the room. It was usual for any foot washing, carried out by the lowest ranking servants, to take place before the start of the meal. Feet could get very dirty in the streets of a town in those days.

Try to imagine what the atmosphere was like when Jesus did this. My imagination gives me a picture like this: The disciples would, at first, just be puzzled when Jesus got up and took off his outer tunic and wrapped a towel round his waist. Then he filled a basin with water – what is he going to do they will have been wondering. There will have been shocked surprise and horror when he started to wash the feet of the disciple next to him, probably the beloved disciple. Then the next one, and the next one, until he came to Peter. By then the initial stunned silence will have given way to a general muttering as one disciple after another will have started to whisper to his neighbour, “what on earth is he doing now? Why is he doing that?”

Peter protests: “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” It is all too easy to hurry on to where Jesus says he has set an example for us and to miss the significance of what he has just done. Jesus was the leader, the boss, the captain, the managing director of their threatened revolt against the Roman occupying powers, he was the greatest prophet seen in Jerusalem for hundreds of years, he was God – and he was placing himself with them, or below them, in the social order. It was a very deliberate act clearly equating himself with ordinary human beings.

What an amazing God we have, that places himself so low, so close to us. Jesus made possible the things that Paul says in Romans 6 where we are said to be ‘with him’ 5 times in 5 verses: we were baptized into his death, the death of Jesus, the death of the Messiah, the death of the Son of God; we were buried with him so that as he was raised from the dead we too may live a new life; we are united with him in his death; we are united with him in his resurrection; we died with Christ so we will also live with him. We are in a very special way ‘with him’.

None of that would have been possible had Jesus remained aloof from his disciples, if he had shown all the time that he was a different order of being, that we could not emulate, we could not match in any way. No! Our God, our Jesus, was prepared to lower himself so that we could meet him at about the same level. We, you and I, can talk about how we are part of the body of the Messiah, the Lord of Creation. This is our royal status. WOW and triple WOW!

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