John 12:44-50

03/21/10
John 12:44-50
Hudson UMC

This morning, we finish many things. First, we finish chapter twelve in the Gospel of John. In doing this, we finish the first half of the book, where Jesus is engaged in public ministry; teaching and doing miracles for everyone He meets. The second half of the book is geared much more at the private teaching that Jesus gave His disciples, those who were better prepared to understand the mysteries of God. For those of you who are wondering if we will ever finish John, the answer is “yes.” The second half will go much faster than the first half. Finally, we are finishing the last of the Sundays of Lent before Palm Sunday and Easter. Once Easter is over, a whole different tone will come over our Scripture reading.

Our passage for this morning is the last statement that Jesus makes in public. From this point on, we will only be reading about Jesus’ final teaching in the Upper Room on Maundy Thursday, the crucifixion, the resurrection and what happens after that point. Since this is the last thing Jesus has to say to the general public until the apostles are sent out, we might expect it to be something of a summary of what He has already said. This is indeed what it is. We do not hear anything different here than we have heard already in John’s Gospel.

“Then Jesus cried aloud: ‘Whoever believes in me believes not in me but in him who sent me. And whoever sees me sees him who sent me.” This is not a new statement, but it is a stronger way of saying what He has said before. Earlier in the Gospel, we have heard Jesus explain that He is a manifestation of God’s love for the whole world. We have heard Him explain that the one that “God has sent speaks the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure. The Father loves the Son and has placed all things in his hands.” In a discussion with the Jewish leaders, Jesus explained that He does not do His own works but only the works of the Father who sent Him.

However, this statement claims that whoever believes in the man Jesus does not really believe in a human, but believes in the God who sent Him, that is, the God that Jesus calls Father. This is very important for us to understand. Many times, people put God over here and Jesus over there, as if you could have Jesus and not have God or have God and not have Jesus. Jesus is saying that faith in Him and faith in God are completely bound up together. If you believe in Jesus, you believe in God. In fact, you have a deeper understanding of God than you could ever have if you didn’t believe in Jesus. There is no God other than the God that has come among us as the man Jesus. If we try to find God somehow outside of Jesus, we are looking for a God that, quite simply, does not exist. Our statements about the character of God are only true inasmuch as they are true statements about the character of Jesus.

The great Christian thinkers of the early church wanted to make sure that their congregations understood how significant it is that Jesus says what He says here. They point out that the apostles, for example, would never say about themselves what Jesus says about Himself here. None of the apostles would ever say, “The one who believes in me believes not in me but in He who sent me.” They would never say that because they would not tell people to believe in them at all. When we say that we believe in Jesus, we don’t mean it in the same way that we might if we are trying to encourage someone and we say, “I believe in you.” When we are talking to someone else, what we mean is, “I have confidence that you can handle your situation, even if you don’t.” When we say we believe in Jesus we are saying, “We believe that you are God, that you have the authority to forgive sins and to heal our brokenness.”

The next thing Jesus says is, “I have come as light into the world, so that everyone who believes in me should not remain in the darkness.” This is good news for us in our modern situation. In a world where sin is more available to us than ever before, where we can maintain our anonymity on the internet and get involved in all kinds of sin with no accountability whatsoever, it is extremely easy to slide into darkness. We even have elected officials who, while they are about the business of leading our nation, find themselves caught up in all kinds of scandals. It all goes to show us how prone we are as human beings to live in darkness. I can’t speak for everyone who has had a scandal, but I would imagine that, if they were able to get the right kind of support and if they learned to lean on God in the aftermath of the painful exposure of their misdeeds, they might begin to live a life that is more free than it has ever been.

Jesus came as a light into the world. The famous Greek Philosopher, Plato, told an allegory of people who lived in a cave who could only see shadows and, because it was all they knew, were convinced that the shadows were all that was real in the world. He said that, if one of these people was released from the chains and was brought out of the cave and made to encounter the light of the sun for the first time, they would be frightened and angry, and want to go back to the shadows that they knew and thought they could understand. Though I don’t hold Plato to be anywhere near the authority of Jesus, he had some very useful insights about humanity. If we live all our lives thinking that the world is all that is real, that all we can enjoy and look forward to is the fleeting joys of this life, if we come face to face through the Holy Spirit with God in Christ, the light of the world, it can be a painful, frightening and profoundly disturbing experience. Once we have met face to face with God, we can either live in the light and experience the joy of eternal life, even here and now, or we can run back to the shadows, to what we know, to what is comfortable.

What Plato didn’t understand is that the light and the world of the real is not simply frightening and disturbing, but loving, personal, and transformative. When we first encounter God, the one who, more than anything else, is really real, we hear good news, that our sins are forgiven, that we no longer need to live in darkness, that God has taken the initiative and joined us in our brokenness so that we might join Him in His fullness. We are given promises to encourage us backed up by the very being of God, so that God cannot go back on them without ceasing to be God. C. S. Lewis once reflected on how we often react to God. “If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are too easily pleased.”

“I do not judge anyone who hears my words and does not keep them, for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.” This sounds odd to us, because Jesus has said, earlier in the Gospel, that the Father has entrusted all judgment into His hands. It might seem to us that, if Jesus was the one in whose hands lies all judgment and He says here that He does not judge the world, we might have a hard time reconciling this with all the passages that clearly claim that there is a judgment to come. In fact, Jesus explains right here that there is indeed still a judgment.

“The one who rejects me and does not receive my word has a judge; on the last day the word that I have spoken will serve as judge, for I have not spoken on my own, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment about what to say and what to speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life. What I speak, therefore, I speak just as the Father has told me.” This is an amazing statement, because it reminds us of the extreme grace of God.

What does it mean for the word that Jesus has spoken to serve as judge on the last day? This sounds somewhat odd. I might go on and on, as many throughout history, especially revivalist American history, have done and remind you that Jesus has lots of harsh things to say, that He makes it very clear that there is a coming judgment and that, at some point, those who have accepted the good news of Jesus Christ and those who have not will be separated. I could explain that the Bible teaches us that such a separation is absolute and final, that it will be sudden, and even that it will surprise everyone, both those who finally go to heaven and those who finally do not. I could frame the whole discussion about Jesus’ words as judge within the context of all the frightening images of hell that abound in Jesus’ parables and teachings. I could do that, but I am not going to.

I am not going to do that, not because I don’t think that those passages have important things to tell us, especially because Jesus talked about the coming judgment more than everything else except money, but because I think there is another side to it, one that we don’t hear all that much about, that is just as important, if not even more so. In the end, when Jesus is saying that His words will judge us, I don’t think He is primarily talking about His warnings against evil behavior or His harsh rebukes of the Pharisees. I think that the words that will stand in judgment over us if we reject Christ and don’t receive His word will be of a decidedly different kind. I think that those words will be along the lines of “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” Other words like this in the Gospel of John might include, “Very truly, I tell you, anyone who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life, and does not come under judgment, but has passed from death to life,” and “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them.” “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” “The Father and I are one.” And, even from this very text, “Whoever believes in me believes not in me but in him who sent me. And whoever sees me sees him who sent me. I have come as light into the world, so that everyone who believes in me should not remain in the darkness.”

I think that those are the words that will act as our judge if we reject Christ and do not believe His word. It is like the author of Hebrews says at one point, “How will we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?” What more could God have said to convince us that He was about our best interests? God has come into our midst, taking our brokenness upon Himself, to shoulder our burdens in order to overcome them from the inside out, has pledged His very being as God for us, and has made promise after promise that, if we simply place our trust in Him, we will not walk in darkness, we will saved from the forces of evil, that we will never be finally conquered by death, that God Himself will abide in us and we will abide in Him. What more do we want from Him? What more could we possibly demand from the God of the universe that He has not already done? If, in spite of God’s willingness to live for us and to die for us, we still reject Christ and His words, it is not the words of warning that will judge us, but the words of hope and promise. God says to us, “Here is hope beyond what you could ever imagine.” If we say, “We want hope, but not that hope,” what hope is there for us? If we say we want happiness and life and all that is good but yet reject the one who brings it to us and fulfills His promises, what good can we possibly receive? The promises of God cannot be separated from God Himself. We either get both the one and the other, or we get neither. We cannot have the good news of Jesus Christ without Christ Himself.

But why would we ever do that? Why would we ever reject those promises? Can there be any rational reason why we would refuse to receive what God has offered? Maybe because we want things our own way, that we want salvation on our own terms, that we want to think that we have contributed something, or that maybe we want to think that we are good enough that we don’t really need to be saved because there is no real danger. All of those things are wild fantasies. We have the assurance of God that those ways of thinking, in spite of being attractive, are completely incompatible with how things really are. This is the reality, the only one there is, that we are helpless but that the Lord God Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, loves us more than we love ourselves, indeed, as we see in His willingness to die for us, loves us more than He loves Himself, and will stop at nothing to save us from disaster.

So, we might rephrase what Jesus has said here. It is as if He has said, “The love that I show you is the very love of God. When you look into my face, you see the face of God. I have come to free you, not just from the bondage that you know you are in, but from the bondage you are not yet aware of but is all too real. I plead with you not to reject me and my words because I and my words are a source of hope and there is no hope outside of me. Do not throw away the only hope there is, a hope that has given everything for you. Listen, for my words are eternal life.” This is the final proclamation that Jesus makes in the public and it is an outburst of love. May the Holy Spirit soften our hearts that we might know more fully than ever before that God’s love is real, powerful, and able to transform even us. Let us pray.

AMEN