John 1:1-18 (2)

08/03/08
John 1:1-18
Hudson UMC

One of the great things about going through a single book of the Bible over an extended period of time is that we can take time and devote it to talking about the details of the text, even focusing on a single phrase if it seems important. In this election season, we are all well accustomed to people scrutinizing every word that comes out of the mouths of politicians. We behave as though we believe that every word, every phrase is somehow important. Sadly, when we pick apart and deeply analyze the words of other human beings, we are all too often trying to spot off-color remarks and other misspeaks. Sadder still, there are people who go over the Scriptures with a fine-toothed comb for no other reason than to find fault, to try and show inconsistencies and even to invent them. However, the reason that we are going to take Sundays where we might look at only a single phrase or concept is that we are hoping to better understand the mind of God; we are hoping that, by looking deeply at the words of the Bible, we might not only understand a particular idea better, but even have a clearer concept of the big picture. There is a phrase in our text for this morning that seems interesting to me and so I thought we might spend some time on it. The phrase is in verse ten. It says, “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.” I don’t know if this caught your attention, but it did mine. I pray that as we consider these words, we might better understand, not only our own context, but also of the ways and goodness of God.

John is saying that the Word “was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.” I think that this is a particularly important thing for us as Americans to consider. After all, John is saying that the world had no concept of who Jesus was, and this should seem like a foreign concept to us. Think about it; nearly everyone in this room grew up in the church, was taught from a young age who Jesus was and is. Now, it might be that you did not truly know Jesus all your life, but you knew about Him, you knew who the church says He is. Even if you were to go outside of the walls of the church and stop random people on the street, you will find an almost universal knowledge about Christ. There can be no surprise to anyone that not everyone in the world truly knows Christ, because there is still so much of the world that is unregenerate, but just about everyone in America knows who Jesus is supposed to be, they know that He is considered to be the savior of the world. Now, look back at John’s words, that the world did not know Him. If it seems like all the world knows who Jesus is these days, it must have been a very different situation two thousand years ago.

The world being talked about in this text is not twenty-first century America, but first century Palestine. When we keep the context in mind, we are not so surprised that people didn’t know who Jesus was supposed to be. After all, He had not been born yet at the time and today we have two thousand years of cultural and intellectual development rooted in, or at least strongly influenced by the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. And yet, though we can understand why the people might not have known Christ at the time, the tone of our passage seems to imply that John is pronouncing judgment on this world that did not know Christ when He came. The question that leaps into my head, and might very well leap into yours when you think about this is, why? Why would John use such a paternal tone when talking about a lack of knowledge that, to be perfectly honest, does not seem too unreasonable to us? John speaks like this because he deeply believes that the world, or at least the Jewish nation, ought to have known Jesus for who He was when they saw Him.

In some ways, this Sunday’s sermon is primarily setting the stage for things that are to come. In the church, we tend to greatly favor the New Testament over the Old. To a certain extent, this makes perfect sense, as the New Testament is composed of two major sections: stories about Jesus and His disciples in the Gospels, and moral and theological teaching in the epistles. In the Old Testament, we have all kinds of stories with all kinds of people, some of which we find to be talking about actions of questionable morality. Beyond this, there are long sections of poetry that may or may not make any sense to us, and lots and lots of prophecy, much of which is not happy news, either to the people to which it was given originally or to us. In fact, in my first two years here, I have been led to believe that several members of the congregation were somewhat discouraged by the fact that I had been preaching from the Old Testament with such frequency, and while I can understand why this might have been your thoughts, it was not without reason. For the foreseeable future, our texts will be exclusively from the New Testament, particularly from the Gospel of John, and yet we have not by any stretch of the imagination abandoned the Old Testament.

The simple fact of the matter, which Christians all too often neglect, is that the New Testament does not stand by itself. Not only do the two Testaments of the Christian Bible illuminate each other, neither one of them ultimately makes any sense by itself. The Old Testament seems somehow incomplete without the Messiah and the New Testament has absolutely no foundation without the Old Testament and the nation of Israel. If Christ had dropped down into New York City without a nation of Israel and without an Old Testament, he would have been completely incomprehensible. As we go through this beautiful Gospel, the most theological and beloved of the four in the New Testament, I hope you will begin to see that the Old Testament is not somehow dispensable, but vitally important to even a basic understanding of our faith as Christians.

So, in order to explain, both the statement in question and my point about the significance of the Old Testament, I want to talk about a few reasons that the nation of Israel ought to have recognized Jesus as the Messiah. I will restrict myself to only two prophecies first, because we don’t want to be here all day and secondly because, though there are many prophecies about Christ, most of them can have more than one meaning. Prophets would often make predictions that not only pointed ahead to the coming Christ, but also to something imminent, something that was of current interest. I hope to focus on some statements about Christ that have only one meaning, that is, they are only about Christ.

The first example I want to bring from the Old Testament comes from nearly the beginning of the book of Genesis, particularly the story of the Fall. In order to understand what is going on, we need to remember that the goodness of God is often something other than we imagine it to be. We often picture a good person, then multiply it by a million times and pretend that this is what God’s goodness is like. The Bible never talks about God like this. When the goodness of God is manifested in the lives of human beings, it is not usually in making sure that bad things don’t happen to good people or making sure that bad people get their just punishment, but something far greater. When God manifests His goodness to us, it is most often in bringing good out of the very worst situations. To show how amazing our God’s goodness really is, I want to talk about something that God says after human beings, by their own free choice, brought sin and death into the world.

If there was ever a time when there seemed like there was no hope, it was right after the Fall. God had declared to Adam and Eve that, because of their sin, they were going to have to die. Not only that, but that, because of their sin, all human beings would have to taste the bitterness of death. They had been deceived by the serpent, the forces of evil (the devil, if you will) and now, the works of that serpent will rule over them and all their descendants. And yet, in the midst of this sorrow and despair, God speaks a word of hope. God, even in the midst of passing sentence, spoke of a descendent of Adam and Eve, the very people who invited sin and death, bitterness and sorrow, pain and difficulty, into the world, that would crush the head of the serpent that had deceived them. Now this is a big deal; this is hope out of the worst situation imaginable. You see, even if Adam and Eve had not sinned, the serpent would still have been around to deceive humanity. What God is saying is that there will come a man who will crush the works of the devil, who will not be defeated by sin but will rescue us from the law of sin and death. This was precisely the message that Jesus taught. No one else preached forgiveness from the guilt and power of sin like Jesus did. If the people remembered their own Scriptures, they might have recognized that this was the Messiah they had waited for.

The second example I want to use comes somewhere between four hundred and six hundred years later. The people of Israel had been enslaved in Egypt and were crying out under their oppression. A man came along, named Moses, who, because he was inspired and empowered by God, was able to redeem and deliver the people of Israel from their oppression and bondage. Through him, God did a work that completely changed how people interacted with Him. Once, people just did the best they could, praying for guidance and blessings. Now, because of the ministry of Moses, there was a law; there was a code of conduct; there was a form of life. Right and wrong were clearly defined and there was a certain way to live if you were a member of the nation of Israel, God’s chosen people. The point that is important for us is that God, through Moses, declared and promised that He would bring another prophet like Moses to His people. This means that someone was coming that would also redeem and deliver the people of God from their oppression and bondage and that, through Him, God would do a work that would completely change how people would interact with Him. Throughout the Gospels, including the Gospel of John, we see numerous comparisons being made between Moses and Jesus. These are not coincidental but are meant to reflect that this prophecy, made to the Israelites before they settled in the Promised Land, had come true.

All of these things are to try and illustrate the point that we cannot ignore the Old Testament. It plays far too great a role in understanding Christ and Christianity to simply cut it out. In fact, throughout history, there have been numerous individuals who have tried to eliminate the Old Testament out of the Christian Bible. Some have believed that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are not the same God, that somehow one is a God of wrath and judgment and the other one is a God of love and peace. When we read the Bible closely, we start to realize that God is both just and loving, that He is both wrathful and peaceful and that these qualities are not mutually exclusive.

I do not have a snappy teaching for you this morning. Nothing I have to say today could be better expressed with a Powerpoint slideshow or a fancy handout. The content of this sermon might not rivet you or stick with you in vivid memory for months to come, but I pray that, starting today, you might begin to see that God’s story of love and interaction with humanity did not begin with Christ, nor was Christ’s coming incompatible with the actions of God since the beginning, but that our story as the people of God is fundamentally intertwined with the stories of both the Old and the New Testaments. Everything we do is influenced by the stories and images of the Old Testament. We have a building set aside where the people of God gather and make offerings to the Lord, much like the Temple of Israel. We have an altar, reminding us of the sacrifices made by the Israelites. We have a liturgy and we sing songs, just like in the Tabernacle of David. In fact, even in the Christian practice of Holy Communion, which we will celebrate today, we find that we are not the inventors of something entirely new, but are continuing the legacy left by the people who served God before Christ.

Ministry does not happen in a vacuum; Christ did not come from nowhere. How we do things today will have a profound influence on how those who come after us will worship God. Let us learn the lessons that those who have gone before us have to teach us, so that we might pass on this ancient wisdom to our children and grandchildren, and grow ourselves. Let us drink deep from the word of God and learn what Christ would teach us from His life, always remembering the foundation that God had laid before. It is a treasure trove of wisdom and all our efforts to mine it will be met with Divine Blessing. Let us pray.

AMEN