John 10:22-42

11/15/09
John 10:22-42
Hudson UMC

When I started my time at seminary, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of the Trinity: The Three are One, the One is Three, nobody really gets it, but we are supposed to believe it. It was about as good an understanding as everyone else I knew, including the pastors I knew, so I didn’t think too much about it. When I began my Methodist studies courses with Dr. Colyer, I found, for the first time in my life, someone who was brilliant who was absolutely obsessed with the Trinity. I began to learn that this doctrine I had ignored my entire Christian life was actually at the core of the faith. As this began to settle in on my mind, I wanted to find out what was really at the very center of the Christian faith. What is the one belief on which everything else is based? So, I thought about it pretty hard for about two weeks. Then, as Alli and I were on our way home from somewhere, I said to her, “I’ve got it.” She said, “Got what?” “I know what the single most important doctrine of Christian faith is.” “Really? What is it?” And I said, very seriously, not realizing I was saying something silly, “The Incarnation!” Now, the Incarnation is the belief that the God of the universe became a human being and lived among us as the man Jesus. Alli just looked at me and said, “Really, Travis? Jesus? Jesus is the most important part of Christian faith?” I felt a little silly, because, after all, a fourth grade Sunday School student could have told me that Jesus was the most important part of Christianity.

The point is, I am more and more convinced that the fact that God became an actual human being is indeed the most important part of our faith. What is more, I don’t think that it is something that you need a seminary degree to understand. After all, I will bet that many of you, who have lived long in the Scriptures, and who have immersed yourself in the worshipping life of the church, came to this conclusion a long time ago. Maybe you didn’t come out and say it in theologically precise terms, but you have always known it.

Anyway, this is the point of this passage, the divinity of Christ. We read that, at the time of the festival of Dedication, which is what we know today as Hannukah, the Jews gathered around Jesus and said to Him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” Jesus then does precisely this, culminating in the words, “The Father and I are one.” At this, the people picked up stones to kill Him. Now, we might go right past that without noticing what is going on, so I want to stop and reflect on what is happening. The people are good theologians; better than we often are. They realize that Jesus has said something absolutely radical. When Jesus asks them, “I have shown you many good works from the Father. For which of these are you going to stone me?” The response was, “It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you, but for blasphemy, because you, though only a human being, are making yourself God.”

I praise the Lord for people like C. S. Lewis, who, though not trained theologians, have a keen grasp on what is really at stake. In his book, Mere Christianity, this atheist-turned-committed-Christian is trying to help people see that real Christianity is not really like any of the caricatures that we often see portrayed in the media. He writes about how God and humanity interact, emphasizing some of these bold things that Jesus says. He finishes the chapter in this way. “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 a 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.”

One of the things that people have noticed in the Gospels, especially in Mark, is that Jesus seems surprisingly hesitant to call Himself “Messiah.” This has come to be called, “The Messianic Secret.” Now, in our modern, twenty-first century American context, this is hard for us to understand. Isn’t Jesus the Messiah? If so, why would He be so reluctant to say so? I think that a big part of our problem is that Messiah is a loaded term in our modern world. In our minds, often times Messiah, Son of God, Son of Man, savior, and other things are synonyms, they all mean the same thing. If Jesus is the Son of God or the Son of Man, He must be the Messiah, because of how we understand the word “Messiah.”

However, the word “Messiah” was a loaded term to the people at the time, too, but in a very different way. You see, Jesus is not the only person who was called “Messiah” throughout the ages. The Hebrew word, “Messiah” means “anointed one,” and is used to describe anyone who has been anointed by God for a particular purpose. Most often, it is used to describe a king of Israel, and even more specifically, a son of David who is the political ruler seated in Jerusalem.

It was in this way that the people thought of the promised Messiah. If you were to go up to an average Jew on the street and ask them what the coming Messiah was going to be like, they would probably answer something along these lines. “The promised Messiah is going to come and overthrow the Roman government that is oppressing us, trample the armies of our enemies and deliver us, like Moses did, from our misery, setting up the kingdom of God here in Israel.”

So, we need to understand that, when the Jews ask Jesus, “If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly,” they are not really asking Him if He is the Son of God of if He will save them from their sins; they are asking Him if He is going to lead a revolution against the Roman government. This, of course, would be a serious thing. If Jesus were to be leading a political rebellion, the Romans would want to have Him killed. He might even have to suffer the death of a political criminal, that is, He might even be crucified.

It is possible that the people really wanted to know if He was the Messiah because they wanted to join Him in His mission. What is more likely, however, especially when we remember that these people have said all kinds of terrible things about Him before, is that they are trying to set Him up. What would happen if Jesus were to go around saying “I am the Messiah?” He might get a bunch of followers, but He would also very quickly attract the negative attention of the government, who would lock Him up and put Him to death to make sure that He could not cause any trouble.

What is amazing about this passage is that, while it seems at first that Jesus is once again, answering the wrong question, by going off on what seems to be a tangent, deflecting the issue back to His teaching about sheep and how His sheep hear Him and follow Him, He is actually giving a very interesting answer to their question. Jesus really is telling them that He is the Messiah. He begins by saying, “I have told you, and you do not believe.” Though Jesus points to His miracles as something worth paying attention to, He points to His relationship with His Father as the real reason He is the Messiah.

This is truly incredible. What Jesus has done is radically reinterpreted what the word “Messiah” means. He has already redefined what “life” means, even “eternal life,” He has redefined what Sabbath means; He has even redefined what “love” is. Now, He turns and reinterprets “Messiah.” According to Jesus, when we think of Him as the Messiah and do not allow Him to show us what it means to be the Messiah, we will always come up with some kind of understanding that is not quite true. It might have some true elements, but it will not be quite right. We find that we need to think out our concept of Messiah, along with everything else, in light of what God has actually done, and not just however we want to think about it.

So, what does this mean for us today? How does this redefinition impact us? After all, we tend to think about the Messiah in more spiritual terms than the ancient Jews did. Do we still need to have our terms reinterpreted? Indeed we do, because, even if we do not fall into exactly the same trap as the ancient Jews, the moment we take our eyes off of God’s full and final work among us, we quickly lose sight of how things actually are.

For example: The Jews in our passage desperately wanted Jesus to identify Himself primarily in terms of political power and conflict. In our own way, we do the same thing. One way we do this is by attempting to make Jesus our political leader by saying that our President and other major leaders need to be Christians. We are hoping that, if we just get the best Christians we can find into these offices, God will renew our nation and transform our culture. The problem is that this presupposes that the way we do politics today is compatible with how God would rule our society, and I am not convinced that this is the case. I think that if we really allowed God to have His way in our midst, nearly our entire way of life would be changed.

Another way that we attempt to make Jesus into a political figure is when we convince ourselves that the primary if not the only task for individual Christians or for the church at large is to lobby the government and make righteous laws. While we should do this, and we will have a hard time answering to God if we do not use the votes we have to help establish a more just society, if this attitude is rooted more in some secular or abstract understanding of “justice” and not as the outworking of the concrete reality of God’s love as manifest in Jesus Christ, we have reduced the man who said “The Father and I are one,” and “The Father is in me and I am in the Father,” the man who is the entirety of God in our midst, into a lobbyist serving some truth greater than Himself instead of being the very truth of God in His very Self.

We need to think through the incredible significance of Jesus’ statement, “The Father and I are one.” Again, what this means is that there is an unbroken bond of unity between Jesus and God. They cannot finally be separated. The great ancient theologian, Athanasius, used to say, “Everything we say about the Father, we say about the Son, except ‘Father.’” Likewise, everything we say about the Son, we say about the Father, except “Son.”

I think that sometimes, we are not comfortable with what Jesus says in this passage, that we cannot finally say one thing about Him and another thing about God. I don’t think we are always comfortable because Jesus sometimes does things and says things that we do not always understand or that we do not always like. What if Jesus comes out and makes a claim that violates what we think about God? Well, we either need to revise our thoughts about God in light of Christ, God’s incarnation, or else we need to say that something is true about Christ that is not true about God, which, as we discussed last week, we are free to do, but once we do it, the bottom drops out of the Gospel because Jesus is no longer God in our midst, but something other than God.

I think that the most responsible action we can take, indeed, I think it is the only truly Christian, that is, centered on Christ, action we can take, is to allow this man Jesus, who has the Father in Him and He, in turn, is in the Father, to shape all our thoughts and all our words about God. When we do that, what do we find? We find that God, in the end, does not fit our understanding of the world around us, challenges our understanding, stands over and against our efforts to put Him in a box, and demands to be understood in light of His own self-revelation and self-communication.

If Jesus and the Father are one, if they mutually dwell within each other, it shows us just how amazing the love of God really is. It is not a love that holds itself off at a distance from us, it is not a love that stops short of ultimate sacrifice, it is not a love that is somehow separate from who God really is, but is bound up in the very life of God. When we hear Jesus tell us about God, we can trust that it is really true, because it is not simply a man telling us, but God Himself telling us about Himself. When we see Jesus go to the cross, it is not simply a heartwarming example of noble sacrifice, but an incredible manifestation of divine love. God has not waited for us to get our act together, He has not made His promises to us conditional on how well we listen to Him and how well we obey Him. Indeed, as Paul reminds us in his letter to the Romans, “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

By saying that the Father and He are one, Jesus is again redefining a term. This time, He is telling the Jews that they need to rework their thinking of the God that He calls “Father,” in light of Him. Jesus is redefining the very concept of God. Just like the people during Jesus’ time, we are surrounded by all kinds of different views about who God is. It can be disorienting. If every group of people has a different idea of God, how can we have any kind of certainty upon which we can live our lives? As people who claim the name of Christ, as people who believe that Christ and the Father are indeed one, that Jesus is in the Father and the Father is in Him, let us stand in awe at the incredible self-revelation of God. Let us rejoice that the things that Jesus did in our flesh are indeed the works of God for us and our salvation, as the creed says. While others might think that Jesus is a liar, or a madman, or a devil, or anything else, let us remember what He really is, the incredible manifestation of the God who has loved us to the uttermost with a love that will not let us go. Let us pray.

AMEN