John 5:18-24

03/01/09
John 5:18-24
Hudson UMC

I never really noticed it when I was growing up, but I am very much my parents’ child. I never really thought that I was all that similar to my parents as a kid. I knew that my parents were different from my friends’ parents, but nothing ever stuck out to me that made me realize that there are many ways that I am just like them. There are some ways that I am very much like my father. We both place a high value on quality. If something is worth doing, by golly, it is worth doing right. We both have a strong sense of order; even if we disagree with how the system works, we feel that we need to work within it rather than try to supplant it. The older I get, the more I realize that I have a lot in common with my dad. However, there are some marked differences as well. Though I can reflect on how similar we are, there are many way where we are not alike. Nobody would confuse us for having exactly the same personality. For example, he has a far greater appreciation for sports and adventure than I do. He is my father and I am his son and we are joined by the bonds of family, but we are not fundamentally the same.

The point that Jesus is making to the Jewish leaders in this passage is that His relationship to His Father is not the same as the relationship that we have with our Fathers. For us, there are similarities and differences between us and our earthly parents; we are kind of like them and kind of not. Jesus tells us that He is like His Father in every way. There are no differences in character between them. He gives several examples to make His point. “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise.” I know that I have often done things that my father does not do. I’ll bet you could all think of a few things that you have done that your father would not do. If nothing comes to mind, think back to your days as a teenager.

What Jesus is saying is that He and His Father do not do different things, they do not compartmentalize the work that the Triune God has to do and then one Person does one thing and another Person does another. They are fundamentally united in all they do. This tells us two major things. First, it means that Jesus is completely in tune with what God is doing and we can trust that, when we look at Jesus, we do not see Him acting on His own, but we see an accurate picture of the work of God. But it goes beyond this. The unity of Jesus with God does not just tell us what Jesus is like, but it also tells us what God is like. I can’t tell you how many people there are in the world who are afraid of God. People think that God is just waiting in heaven for us to make a mistake so He can zap us or tell us how much of a sinner we are. Even people who go to church and know about Jesus think this way. When we say that Jesus is God, we are also saying that the God of the universe, whom we have never seen, is not finally different than Jesus. Jesus does what He sees the Father doing and He does everything that He sees the Father doing.

Think about the comfort this brings. There is no God other than the God that is fully revealed in Jesus Christ. If you have an idea about God that terrifies you, read the Gospels carefully. Do you see Jesus behaving that way? If not, then it is not what God is like. Are you afraid that, when God looks at you, He sees only a despicable, rotten sinner? Look at what we actually see revealed about God in Jesus. What does He say to people? So far in John, we have seen Him calling the rejected of the world, providing for celebration in the midst of scarcity, teaching real wisdom to a man who had an inaccurate view of God, showing kindness to a Samaritan woman of ill-repute, bringing salvation and joy to the entire Samaritan village, healing a royal official’s son, and healing a crippled man. There is no doubt that these people were sinners like you and me, but what does Jesus do? To those who do not insist on clinging to their arrogance and self-righteousness, to those who do not set themselves against Him and are willing to receive Him, what does He say? “Do you desire to be made well?” And even if we give a weak answer, He says, “Stand up, take up your mat and walk.” The only words of condemnation you will ever hear from the mouth of Christ are against those who hate Him and refuse to receive His good gifts.

I think that it is amazing that Jesus says, “The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing; and he will show him greater works than these, so that you will be astonished.” Jesus had just healed a man who had not been able to walk for thirty-eight years, and they were going to see greater works than these. Why? “So that you will be astonished.” I tell you what, they had better be astonished if they see greater things than that. And yet, look at them. They did not seem to be very excited about the fact that Jesus had worked this mighty miracle. All they could do was find fault, all they could do was complain about what Jesus was doing. In fact, the only thing they could think of doing after Jesus healed this man was to kill him. Greater miracles were going to happen and the leaders would be astonished, but they would not necessary believe. You need to understand, the miracles are not the reason why we believe. God might do mighty signs and wonders among us; He might heal our sickness and protect our children, but the real reason we believe is not because of these things. We believe because God has transformed our lives and begun the process of conforming us to the image of His Son.

Jesus continues with another example. “Indeed, just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whomever he wishes.” In the Old Testament, the power of God raised several people from the dead. Jesus has not yet brought anybody back to life in this Gospel but He will. And yet, the physical return of life to the dead body is not what He is talking about. He is talking about spiritual life. We will talk more about this when we get to the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, but I think that it might not have been an entirely good thing that He raised people from the dead during His earthly ministry. After all, when Lazarus was raised, the poor man had to die again. He was one of the few people who had to die and go through the difficulty of the dying process more than once. But the life that Jesus is primarily talking about is life that He gives that nobody can take away from us. He raises us from spiritual bondage and death to newness of life where we can live, even now, participating in the eternal life of God.

Though this entire passage is about the unity and community of the Father and the Son, the next thing that Jesus says is particularly astonishing when we compare it to how we often live. “The Father judges no one but has given all judgment to the Son.” Many people in this room have children; in fact many people here have children who have grown up and moved out, having a life of their own. Though you are proud of them and though they have turned into responsible adults, do you trust them with everything? Do you trust them to do your taxes, to manage your investments, to buy the groceries at the store? Would you sign over all your assets to them for them to manage without any of your input because you trust that they would make exactly the same decisions that you would? If you do, I would bet that you are part of a very small minority. Most of us, even when we trust others with some things, do not trust others with all things. To give an example, one of my professors, when talking about this statement, comments that, in he and his wife’s will, they do not even allow their children to have their full inheritance until they turn thirty. It is difficult for us to trust others completely, but our God has entrusted all things into the hands of the Son, this human being with a nature like ours.

What does this say about how God feels about humanity? Though we can look around and find all kinds of things wrong with human beings and we can look at ourselves and be aware of all of our shortcomings, it seems that God cares an awful lot for humanity. If God were to love us so much that He would send His Son to take our humanity upon Himself and resurrect it and ascend it back to the right hand of God, our humanity must matter a whole lot to Him and so I think that it should matter to us. We are not forsaken by God, but are beloved children.

So, we hear Jesus say that the Father has given all judgment to the Son, but why? “So that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father.” This statement gives us a beautiful glimpse into the heart of the Trinity. The Father does not demand superiority in all things. We sometimes imagine that God is tyrannical and demanding, ordering people around, but what do we see here? We see God the Father insisting that we honor the Son in exactly the same way that we honor Him. Whenever we see the Trinity at work, we see the Persons pointing to one another. The Father gives all judgment to the Son but how does the Son judge? The Son judges according to the declarations of the Father. They are both involved but each of them points to what the other one is doing.

Jesus continues, “Anyone who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him.” I don’t know about you, but I have met a bunch of people who like to talk about God, but do not like to consider Jesus to be equal to the Father. Much of modern theology has spoken of Jesus as a pre-eminent example of what humanity should be, but refuses to call Him God. People, throughout the history of the church, have wanted to call Jesus a prophet, a great moral teacher, a spiritual guru; anything to avoid calling Him God. Why do we do this? In our pluralistic society, I think that we might be afraid of placing our religion above anyone else’s. In a culture that is becoming more and more relativistic and postmodern, we might be afraid to make any statement that claims absolute truth. We don’t want to seem exclusive and what is more exclusive than saying that Jesus was a fully unique human being, not just because He was so wise, but because He was indeed God in flesh, dwelling among us? And yet, I think that, every time we try to reduce Jesus to anything less than the God of the universe, we are not honoring the Son like we honor the Father.

So, how can we honor the Son like we honor the Father? The first step is to care what God thinks. Jesus was speaking to a culture that greatly honored the Father. The God that Jesus calls Father had been worshipped for thousands of years by the Israelites. They refused to give in to the pressures of the Gentile nations, preferring to die rather than become like their neighbors. However, we live in a time and place where not everyone honors the Father. We use the Lord’s name in vain, we tend to care more about how our actions will benefit ourselves than we do about what God thinks about our actions. The first thing we need to do, if we have not done so already, is to honor the Father. We do this when we pray, seeking God’s will, when we rearrange our values and priorities so that they match up with God’s. We do this by reading the Word of God so that we can listen to what He has to say to us and so we can learn what God’s will is for our everyday lives. If we do not do this, on the one hand, it will not take much to honor the Son as we honor the Father; on the other hand, if we do not honor God at all, I can guarantee you that we would be missing Jesus’ point here.

So, once we are honoring the Father, we are called to honor the Son in exactly the same way. This means that we pray to Christ, trusting that He is not only equally powerful with His Father, but is just as willing to hear us. It means that we listen to Jesus. When we read the Gospels, we read all kinds of things that the Son of God has said. If we want to honor the Son, we need to listen to Him; and, when I say we need to listen to Him, I mean that we need to obey Him. The same authority we give God to guide our lives needs to be given to Jesus as well. We honor the Son by rearranging our values and priorities so they can match those of Christ. By reading the Gospels, we can get a pretty good picture of the kinds of things we should be doing because we can see the kinds of things that Jesus is doing. For example, even in this passage, we see Jesus doing the will of His Father. This means that we ought to be doing the will of the Father. To sum this up, we honor the Son by being like Him. Not just doing the things that Jesus does but by thinking the kinds of things that Jesus thinks and feeling the kinds of things that Jesus feels.

Jesus ties honoring the Father with honoring the one that the Father has sent. We honor the Son in the same way, by honoring those that the Son has sent. Jesus selected a handful of people to be sent out as apostles, who would continue to teach the things of Christ, being filled with and led by the Holy Spirit. If we want to honor the Son, we need to honor the teachings of the apostles. We have spent quite a while in the Gospel of John and we will spend quite a bit more time working our way through the life of Jesus, but we cannot only read the four Gospels. We also need the theological and practical guidance found in the epistles. These letters were written by people who had the very Spirit of Christ dwelling inside of them, giving them wisdom to pass on to you and me.

You might have noticed a theme in how we honor the Father and the Son. One of the best ways to honor each person of the Trinity is to read the Bible, the words of God and Christ which have been inspired by the Holy Spirit. However, it is not enough that we read the words on the page and enjoy the stories. They are stories that have a claim on how we live our lives. We must be, as James reminds us, doers of the word and not just hearers. Some of us are dedicating ourselves to some serious time in the Bible this Lent by reading it in its entirety in a short period of time. It is very possible that this is not something that you want to commit yourself to at this point, but I want to encourage you to honor the Son as you honor the Father by dedicating yourself to getting into the Bible every day. I assure you that your life will be transformed.

Let us rejoice that, though we worship the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, our worship is directed to the one true God, the one who created us, redeemed us, and is continuing to transform us. Let us give our praise to the God who has come to us as one of us, as the man Jesus of Nazareth, and give Him everything for He is worthy. Let us pray.

AMEN