John 12:36b-43

03/14/10
John 12:36b-43
Hudson UMC

When I was deciding on whether or not I really wanted to preach the entire way through the Gospel according to John, I was thinking about what it would involve. The single greatest advantage is that it gives us as a body an opportunity to consider the ministry of Jesus from beginning to end and see how it influences our lives and to then be able to say at the end of it, “We have really considered an entire Gospel.” In a world that loves sound bytes, surrounded by Christians who, in spite of all their good intentions, can do nothing more than grab a few verses out of context to think about, we have a chance as an entire church to thoughtfully consider large sections of Scripture and how different passages relate to one another. It used to be extremely common practice to do what we are doing, but it has fallen out of popularity.

I can remember thinking to myself, “You know, Travis, if you set out to preach on every passage of John, you are going to run into some texts that you’d rather not preach on.” I don’t know if you have had the same experience that I have, but there are some things in the Gospel that are not easy to hear. God is always challenging us and our preconceived notions, but there are some places where God stands firm and we have nothing to do but wrestle with what He has said and try to make sense of it.

There is a passage from the book of Isaiah that is referenced by each of the four Gospel-writers, though they each word it slightly differently. It appears in John right here, where John is lamenting the lack of faith in spite of all the miracles Jesus had performed. He puts it this way, “And so they could not believe, because Isaiah also said, He (that is, God) has blinded their eyes, and hardened their heart, so that they might not look with their eyes, and understand with their heart and turn-and I would heal them.” This statement has tended to get people all riled up and with good reason. It seems to paint a picture of God that we don’t really like all that well.

Every other time I have read this passage, I have done so as a private Christian, one who is not bound by any kind of authority to have to make a decision about every single text. The moment someone enters into Christian leadership, however, all of that changes. All of a sudden, the passages that I used to put off making a decision about or really wrestling with take on a new urgency. As a Christian who is not bound by an obligation to teach the Scriptures, I can look at this text and say, “God is a great mystery. I don’t understand this; I may not even like what I think I understand, but I trust that God is bigger.” Now that I have to stand up in front of all of you and tell you what this difficult statement means, I don’t have a choice. I can’t just brush it aside, I can’t just say to you, “I don’t really know what to make of this.” I am no longer free to pretend that I’ve really dealt with it in my own life, because I haven’t. So, in spite of the fact that I could list a whole bunch of passages that I would rather preach to you about this morning and only a few that I would look forward to with more anxiety than this one, I am glad to be doing it. First, because it gives me an opportunity to make it very clear that I don’t have it all together, that parts of the Bible still deeply trouble me, that you are not alone in your struggle with the Bible. The other reason I am glad to have to preach on it is because it has helped me understand it a little better and come to some kind of peace, even if there is some of it that still escapes me.

The problem with the statement is that it really seems to make God the cause of people’s unbelief. In this text, we are not dealing with the sad fact that some people don’t believe, but we are dealing with a passage that seems to root the reason that those people don’t believe in God. If it was just God lamenting that the people’s eyes were blind and their hearts were hardened so they didn’t look to God and be healed, it would be no problem, because it is their own fault for being so stubborn and resisting God. But that isn’t what we read here. We read that they could not believe because God had done the blinding and hardening so that they would not turn and be healed. It is the “so that” and the fact that God is the source that makes it problematic.

Traditionally, there have been a few ways to look at this passage. One way, which tends to believe in a high doctrine of predestination, states that, before God created the universe, He already had decided that some people would come to believe in Him and the rest of humanity would not. If we already have this kind of belief, this text poses no problem to us. If we really believe that God sovereignly causes some to believe and causes others not to, then it makes perfect sense. The people who were there were simply predestined not to believe. Sure, it is easier to believe that if you are convinced that you are not in the same boat, but if it finally rests in God’s arbitrary choice, who are we to say that God is unjust?

Now, the Methodist tradition, of which we are a part, has not traditionally supported such a high doctrine of predestination, so it would be irresponsible for me as a United Methodist pastor to promote such a view. It would be even more irresponsible because I don’t believe it. And yet, if we reject predestination as classically explained, what in the world are we supposed to make of this? What choice do we have but to say that God’s unilateral and impersonal choice is the only difference between life and death? We might try to think about it by raising the question, “Do events happen because God said they would or does God say ahead of time what was going to happen anyway?” We could get into a long debate about this question, and I have done so with several people, but it doesn’t really solve the problem. We still have God blinding eyes and hardening hearts.

Another question that we might ask is, “Does God’s hardening and blinding people once imply that they will not always be hardened and blind or is it a once and for all event?” Various people have held various points of view and where you come down on this issue will shape how you understand a whole list of difficult texts in the Bible. And yet, there is a temptation to think that this doesn’t solve the problem of human responsibility. If God hardens people for a period of time and that’s why they don’t believe, how can we ever be sure that people who are not acting as God would have them are not doing so simply because God has hardened them for a time? We need to try to find some larger, overarching understanding that will help us to put this specific event in context.

I think that we can begin to find that context by looking at how John frames the quotation. John is a master story-teller, and he almost never places two ideas together without them having something to say about each other. Right before he tells us the difficult words from Isaiah, he says, “Although he had performed so many signs in their presence, they did not believe in him.” This tells us a few things. It shows us that, if the primary purpose of the miracles was to convince those who, until that point, had no faith in Jesus, they failed miserably. So we must either think that God failed miserably or that the miracles have a different purpose. In many ways, the miracles are evidence that Jesus is Immanuel, God with us, but not necessarily evidence that will convince us on their own.

This is really no surprise, because, though once upon a time, people claimed that the miracles in the New Testament were sufficient to convince anyone that Jesus is God, we find that this just isn’t so. There are all kinds of people who read the Gospels, who even teach them in universities, who simply do not believe that Jesus is who the church proclaims He is. What is more, people like you and me aren’t convinced simply because Jesus is said to have done a bunch of miracles. We are convinced because God speaks to our hearts through the Holy Spirit and takes the life that is in Christ and makes it real in our lives. There really is no way to get to God except in Christ and through the Spirit. Now, you very well may have first become aware of this activity of God while thinking about the miracles of Jesus, but your coming to know God is a decidedly supernatural event. We cannot break Christian faith as portrayed in the New Testament and attested to in two thousand years of Christian history down into simply rational and intellectual categories. We are talking about a life that is, as Paul says to the Colossians, “Hidden with Christ in God.” Once we believe in Christ, the miracles are convincing, but until God has begun the process of transformation and moved decisively in the heart and life of a person, the miracles are just stories.

After the Isaiah quotation, we are told the following. “Nevertheless many, even of the authorities, believed in him.” So far, so good. It sounds really good, like, even in spite of what seemed to be a complete lack of faith, there are still some who believe. And these people aren’t just ordinary folks, but are the authorities. What great allies for the future! Ah, but what else do we read? “But because of the Pharisees they did not confess it, for fear that they would be put out of the synagogue; for they loved human glory more than the glory that comes from God.”

This is not a compliment. In John, belief in Jesus and committed, whole-hearted discipleship are utterly inseparable. There is never a single instance of the word “faith” as a noun in the entire Gospel. John always talks about people believing, but never that they “have faith,” as if faith was something you could possess and do whatever you wanted with. John consistently prefers to talk about faith, not as nouns but as verbs. Throughout this entire Gospel, faith is not what you “have” but what you “do.” It is active and dynamic. The faith of these authorities, which is so afraid of being mistreated by other human beings is far short of the faith that Jesus has been telling us about.

To really understand the faith that these authorities had, let us consider what they do with it. These very authorities would, within a week, be deciding what they were going to do with Jesus. This faith that they are said to have did not seem to make much of a difference. We hear John tell us explicitly here that their faith was not strong enough to risk loss of power or position. Within a short period of time, we will see that they are not willing to stand up to the authorities who don’t believe when they want to put Jesus to death and they go along with it, allowing the one that they say they believe in to be killed. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that, when John tells us about the faith of the authorities, he is being very sarcastic, that this faith isn’t worth much and they certainly don’t have the kind of faith that Jesus has been speaking of.

So, this conclusion to the first half of John seems to be somewhat pessimistic, but it is what we should have expected from the opening passage of John where we are told, “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” The Isaiah passage is not really any more depressing than this statement at the very beginning of the book. In fact, I think that we might even get some insight into what is really going on if we think that somehow, the fact that God entered into our situation so completely has something to do with God’s hardening and blinding of the people.

By entering completely into our broken condition, God met us face to face. This is more than we can handle. By confronting us in the depths of our sin, that sin is exposed for all that it is. By forcing humanity to come to terms with God, we are forced to realize that, because we are all broken by sin, we, if left to our own devices, would choose, as the authorities in the passage, human glory instead of the glory that comes from God. God did what He did, knowing full well that, even the little sight and softness of heart that we thought we had is not really there at all, simply on the basis of nature.

This is not, in the end, a depressing thing, but one that is absolutely joyous. If God had not exposed our weakness, we would have still thought that we were strong, but we would still have been weak and in need of help. If God had not explained to us that faith without the supernatural interaction of God by the power of the Holy Spirit, is something that is completely beyond our reach, we would think that, since we believe in Jesus, we are somehow more noble than the ones who don’t. We would think that, somehow, we were good enough to make the decision based on our own willpower, when in reality, even that decision, even our free, human response to God, is preceded by God’s grace, what John Wesley called God’s prevenient grace, or the grace that always goes before us. Even Wesley, who fought against predestination continually throughout his ministry, claimed that our freedom to choose or reject God is not intrinsic to our humanity but a freely given gift of God that flows from the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

So, finally we can ask the question, what is the passage saying to us today? The passage is reminding us that, without God sustaining our faith, it isn’t worth a hill of beans; but, as the entire Gospel reminds us, God does sustain our faith. The passage is warning us against putting our trust in things that are not God, even the good things that come from God. The miracles of God are not God and so we cannot put our trust in them. We can only trust in God, the source of those miracles. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it is warning us against having a faith like that of the authorities. Are we fair-weather Christians, who say we believe but whose faith has no real and substantial impact on our lives? This doesn’t mean we should all like exactly the same way, but God should be involved in all of our everyday activities.

We are getting ever nearer to Good Friday and Easter, the time of year when we go out of our way to remember what Jesus has done for us. This passage, among others, calls us to answer the question, “What kind of faith did Jesus die for me to have?” Everyone has to wrestle with that question and everyone needs to find a solution that they can have peace with God about, but it must not be ignored. Our faith and our salvation has cost God more than we can ever imagine and He did it only out of His sheer love for you and for me.

The really amazing thing is not that some people don’t believe in God, but, in light of how hard it is to believe, how many people misunderstood Jesus throughout His life, that anyone believes. And yet, here we are, not just one or two faithful people, but a whole community of people bound together by a common faith. Even if we have nothing else in common, we are united in the love of Christ. Let us give praise and thanksgiving to the God who transforms us, sometimes, even in spite of ourselves. Let us pray.

AMEN