John 5:30-47

03/22/09
John 5:30-47
Hudson UMC

We finally wind down Jesus’ teaching to the Jewish leaders and we hear where, for Jesus, the rubber meets the road. The Jewish leaders clearly do not believe in Jesus and want to know why they should. In this last part of the conversation, Jesus shows that He did not come out of the blue, but there were witnesses who have pointed to Him and claimed that He is faithful. Jesus does not force people to believe, nor does He take offense when people are hardhearted, He simply places the evidence in front of the people, reminds them of the importance of this decision, and lets them make up their minds for themselves.

Jesus claims, “If I testify about myself, my testimony is not true.” We need to understand that Jesus is not saying that He is unreliable or prone to lying. He is calling to mind some very important ideas that are all throughout the Old Testament. The books of the law make it quite clear that nothing is to be determined in court by the evidence of only one witness. Everything needs to be verified by two or more witnesses. In this passage, Jesus will name four witnesses that point to Him. The other idea is found in the book of Proverbs. Chapter 27, verse two says, “Let another praise you, and not your own mouth; a stranger, and not your own lips.” Basically, this proverb reminds us that, if anyone is going to brag about us, it shouldn’t be ourselves. Jesus is refusing to boast about His authority and power in this passage. He is going to let other people do it.

The first witness Jesus mentions is John the Baptist. We will not hear anything else from him in the gospel of John, but he has said many interesting things about Jesus. “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” “He must increase and I must decrease.” “He is the one coming after me, whose sandal I am not fit to untie.” These are not the kinds of things that people say all the time. John didn’t really want all that many people to follow him. He directed people to Christ, hoping that people would only look at him long enough to see him point to the long-awaited Messiah.

Jesus calls John a burning and shining lamp. What a compliment. John was not simply a lamp to guide the way, he was a burning and shining lamp, one that is simply exploding with light. And yet, what is the lamp supposed to do but illuminate our paths. The lamp is good and it is better to use a lamp than be in darkness, but we are called to bask in the glory of the sunshine, which is the very Son of God. As a preacher, I hope that I can be a burning and shining lamp, to help people find their way, but if people rest content in the light that I bring, they will miss the overwhelming light and power of God in Jesus Christ. We read that the leaders, “were willing to rejoice for a while in” John’s “light,” but they never really listened to him, never really wanted the Messiah to be real and in front of their faces. Brothers and sisters, be burning and shining lamps, so that all might see the light of God in you, but always direct them back to the true light: Christ, the light of the world.

The second of the witnesses that Jesus talks about are the deeds that the Father has given Him to complete. Jesus is saying, “Look around. Do you see anybody else healing the sick, turning water into wine, and teaching with divine authority? Maybe, just maybe, the person doing these kinds of deeds should be listened to.” If they did not believe that these healings were really the work of God, but were rather the work of the devil, then they didn’t have to believe in Jesus. In fact, if they thought that healing people was the work of the devil, they probably wouldn’t want to believe in Him.

God is at work in our midst whether we always notice it or not. God is touching hearts. I can bear witness to the transforming power of Jesus Christ in my own life and I will bet that many of you can, too. If we do not always find ourselves wanting to listen to Jesus, or if we have our doubts that He is who the church has believed He is for the past two-thousand years, let us make sure we are paying attention to the works of the Father that are still being done in our midst by Christ through the Holy Spirit.

The third witness that Jesus refers to is the Father Himself. I can’t imagine that the Jewish leaders were convinced by this. Jesus goes on to say, “You have never heard his voice or seen his form, and you do not have his word abiding in you, because you do not believe him whom he has sent.” This represents an argument that seems a bit circular. Jesus says that His Father has testified on his behalf but the people cannot believe Him because they do not believe Jesus. This is really not so much an argument to convince a person who has made up their mind not to believe as it is a statement that the Father is always pointing us to the Son and the Son is always pointing us to the Father. If we really believe in either the Father or the Son, we will believe in both.

I have been moving pretty quickly through all this stuff because I want to spend a little bit more time on the fourth witness, the Scriptures. Jesus says, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life.” I think that it is amazing that Jesus talks about the Scriptures in the company of John the Baptist, the miracles He was performing, and the Father Himself. I must remind you that Jesus is talking primarily about the Old Testament, as the New Testament had not yet been written.

The statement “You search the Scriptures” as we find it in many English translations is not entirely faithful to the Greek. In the original, it is a command. “Search the Scriptures!” Jesus is telling the Jewish leaders, those who were in charge of teaching the things of God to the people of God, to read their Bibles if they want to understand Him. This is not the only time that the New Testament talks about people searching the Scriptures. We also read about Paul ministering in Berea and that the people, after hearing the good news, did not simply sit back and say, “Oh, isn’t this Jesus thing neat?” but they searched the Scriptures every day to verify and understand the Gospel. If you have any desire to know who Jesus is and to understand what difference He can make in your life, whether you are a new believer or you have been a Christian all your life, search the Scriptures because they bear witness to Him.

I think it is especially important that we pay attention to Jesus’ pointing to the Scriptures because it is, in a sense, the best if not only source for us to learn more about God’s plan in Christ for us. John the Baptist is no longer living. The only access we have to what he said to point to Jesus is through the Scriptures. Jesus was doing the works of the Father. While we believe that God is still doing works through the Holy Spirit, we only know about the works that Jesus Himself was doing in and through the Scriptures. Even the witness of the Father is primarily mediated to us through the witness of the Old and New Testaments. There is a sense in which all four of these witnesses are packed up into the one witness of the Bible. If you want to begin the Christian life, if you want to grow in grace, if you want to be empowered for a life of holiness, if you want to reach out to others and share the good news that is offered to them, I can recommend no other resource more highly than the Scriptures. You can go to church, be around other Christians, hear sermons, and go to Sunday School, but without disciplined, daily Bible Study, you will never grow like God wants you to. Jesus and Paul both recommend the Scriptures in the highest terms, so I recommend the Bible as highly as possible.

I want to spend the rest of my time this morning talking about the statement that Jesus makes right at the end. “Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father; your accuser is Moses, on whom you have set your hope.” Now, most of us have not grown up showing particular reverence for Moses and his writings, so we might not be able to relate to this statement at first, but it strikes closer to home than we might want to admit.

You see, the Jewish leaders made Judaism a complex code of morals and ethics. They looked to the Old Testament, particularly the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, the books of Moses, to give them rules to live by. So long as they followed them, they thought that they would be seen as good. The problem is, they were not able to live according to Moses. They were not as good as they thought they were. Moses, the one they loved, the one who wrote the law code that they claimed to follow, would accuse them because they always fell short of the high demands of the law.

Though we, as Christians, do not make a heavy appeal to the Torah, we tend to fall into the same trap. We all too often want to make Christianity a complex code of morals and ethics as well. This is true of both conservatives and liberals. Conservatives tend to say that, so long as you keep yourself from flagrant sins that society condemns, or, even more so, from sins that society is in controversy about, you can be smug and look down at others. Liberals tend to root the purpose of Christianity in transforming the world by overturning unjust social structures, as if we could do this by our own strength. Each of these, while good on its own, like the attempt of the Jewish leaders to follow the Law of Moses, fall far short of God’s plan.

In the end, though, I do not want to perpetuate the stereotype in the church that the Scribes, Pharisees, and other religious leaders in Israel at the time were blatantly evil people. The Jewish leaders were not immoral people by the standards of the day. We tend to look at them as hypocrites because Jesus exposed them and their false motives. However, what made Jesus’ remarks so scandalous is not because the Jewish leaders were so obviously hypocrites, but because everybody in all of Israel thought they were the best that humanity could ever hope for. After all, they followed all the rules, they did more good than anyone else. How could they not be accepted by God?

Jesus said, “Your accuser is Moses, on whom you have set your hope.” The problem with the Jewish leaders is that they had set their hope on a human being. They had hoped that if they just had a really strict way of life, God would love them more. They set their hope on Moses and it was an empty hope. The same is true for us. If we have set our hope on our system of morality or church membership, or doing more good than bad, or being better than other people, we have a false hope. Even the best of us live broken lives. Our only hope, the only hope that is given to us, the hope that sustains us, is the hope of the empty hands of faith, no longer trying to prove to God how good we are, but receiving the free gift which is given for no other reason than that God loves us as we are. It seems unbelievable but it is the good news of Jesus Christ.

“If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But if you do not believe what he wrote, how will you believe what I say?” Again, Jesus is appealing to the Old Testament. He is basically saying, “You already believe that God has definitively spoken through Moses. Why do you not believe him? He promised that there would be another prophet that would lead the people of God, why can you not believe that He has come to renew the people and give them new life?”

Moses, by the guidance of the Holy Spirit, wrote a rigorous code of conduct, clearly distinguishing between the holy and the profane, the clean and the unclean. Jesus amplified that code, making it so that the people who lived by it would be truly righteous or, in His own words, perfect. However, the code of conduct that Jesus prescribes, as those who have been going through the Sermon on the Mount in Sunday school already know, is impossible for us to follow on our own. We simply are not capable of that kind of life. However, the same Jesus who gave us this way to live that might seem more difficult than even the complex do’s and don’ts of the Old Testament, also told us that with God, all things are possible and promised that the God of the universe would not only assist us in our journey, but also dwell inside us, starting from the day of Pentecost, empowering us for this impossible task. What a promise!

The Christian life, moral code and beyond, is only really possible if we are being united to Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. The four witnesses that Jesus points to are all united in trying to get us to become united to Christ. Every word of the Old Testament, every miracle performed by Jesus in the Gospels, every word that the Father speaks into our hearts is meant to draw us to surrender our lives to Christ’s lordship. Let us seek that the Holy Spirit would be sent upon us anew every day so that we might be empowered to do this impossible thing called the Christian life, not only as individuals, but as a community, God’s church. Let us pray.


AMEN