John 7:10-24

06/14/09
John 7:10-24
Hudson UMC

Our passage for this week follows up with the feast of Booths. The disciples went down at the very beginning of the festival but Jesus stayed behind. Here we are, at the very next verse, seeing that Jesus shows up anyway. The Jewish leaders were looking for Jesus, as we are told, to kill Him. By the time Jesus began to preach, about halfway through the weeklong celebration, a great debate had arisen between the people. Some said that Jesus was a good man. Others were saying that He is a deceiver.

I have given this sermon the title of “What Think You of Christ.” The reason that I gave it this title is not because of a particular phrase in the text, not because any of the commentaries or sermons that I have read or heard on this passage look at it from this angle but because of something else. The great theologian of the early twentieth century, Karl Barth, is famous for saying, “Tell me how it is with Christ and I shall tell you who you are.” What he meant by this is that the single most important thing about you is not who your parents are, what job you have, how much money you make, or even how you behave. The most important thing about who you are is what you think about Jesus.

I want to reflect on this question for a bit and ask you to ponder the question, “What think you of Christ?” It might not be such an easy question. Our text shows a few different views of Christ and we will discuss a few others. Where do you fit in? If your answer to “What think you of Christ?” is, “I don’t know,” then you don’t think much of Him.

The first group of people think of Christ as a good man. They don’t think that the leaders are right in persecuting Him and think that He should have the right to say anything He wants to. I think that a lot of Americans fit into this category. We think that Jesus is a good man. We acknowledge that He is someone that we should listen to, even if we are not always good at it. The question is, do we think of Jesus as nothing more than a good man? The people in the crowds that followed Jesus were often convinced that Jesus was good. If they didn’t think He was good, they would not have followed Him. And yet, the crowds did not stay by His side as He was in His darkest hour. The crowd followed Him one minute only to desert Him the next. The same crowd that cried “Hosanna!” soon cried, “Crucify him!”

Although it is surely better to think of Jesus as a good man than as a deceiver of the people, I think that we sometimes hide behind that opinion. How can we hide behind our thinking that Jesus was a good man? We hide behind it if we ever try to rationalize away the intense demands of the Gospel. Anytime we consider the words of Christ to be nothing more than wisdom that can be followed or not followed, depending on our feelings at the time, we are allowing our opinion that Jesus was a good man to prevent us from truly believing that He is God in flesh. Throughout the history of the church, there have been movements that emphasize the humanity of Christ to the point where His divinity is obscured or eliminated. Though Christian faith affirms that Christ is indeed the best example of humanity, it affirms much more than that. Christ is also the fullness of God, dwelling among us. If we say that Jesus is a good man and no more, then He is not yet God to us.

Another group of people in our text say that Jesus is not a good man but someone who deceives the crowd. Now, I don’t imagine that most of you know very many people who quite fit into this category. Most of the people in this room were raised in a culture where you just went to church. Everybody went to church. Even today, when there are so many people who are not actively attending church, most people that we know have some kind of church background. People at least know that churches are places that should be treated with respect, that they are places that are open to everybody. And yet, this view, that Jesus is finally a deceiver, is alive and well. I have an old friend who sees Jesus and the religion that follows Him to be fundamentally destructive to Western culture. He laments the influence of Christianity throughout Europe and America, especially its tendency to eliminate other religions, especially polytheistic ones. This person is by no means a fool, nor is he a menace to society. He is a well-meaning, caring person who, nevertheless, still believes that Christianity is a lie.

The point that I want to make is that one does not have to be a clearly evil person to believe that Jesus is a deceiver. For example, I don’t think that Jesus was a deceiver, but I think that the prophet Mohammed was. I also think that Joseph Smith was a deceiver. Now, I think it is entirely possible that they thought that they were legitimate prophets who were delivering the truth of God to the people of God, but despite their sincerity, I think that their message was fundamentally deceptive. They may have been morally upstanding people, and I can acknowledge that and still believe that they may have been deceivers. I have met many people who are atheists who are, in the eyes of the world, good people; indeed, better than most people. They show by the fact that they do not believe in Jesus that they do not think He was speaking the truth. They believe that He is finally a deceiver of the crowd.

Another group of people share yet another view of Christ. They say, “How does this man have such learning, when he has never been taught?” These are people who are amazed at the fact that this Jesus, this man who was raised and trained to be a carpenter, who never went through the traditional training to become a Rabbi, is teaching with such great authority. Now, though I certainly agree that Jesus is a great teacher that we should listen to for all kinds of guidance, especially moral guidance, I do not at all believe that this is all He is. It is entirely possible that the people who were so impressed with His wisdom and learning responded well because of it, but I don’t think that this is necessarily the case. I get the sense from the text that the people are not so much excited about being disciples as they are about simply being impressed.

Let me make myself a little more clear. I could name for you a handful of theologians and other thinkers that, because of their work, it is very clear that they are extraordinarily brilliant people. They have minds that are absolutely staggering and creative. They are the kind of people who have a kind of strength of intellect that I can only dream of having. And yet, I think that many of these people, despite their dizzying intellect, are very wrong in their conclusions. I can respect their gifts and yet have no desire whatsoever to follow their teaching. Perhaps even more to the point, I have met many people, and you may have as well, who, when they recognize that a person is particularly brilliant, say to themselves, “That person is a genius, but I’ll never understand them so I won’t even try.” Sometimes, we can use a teacher’s genius to place them even farther away from us and to listen to them even less. I think that is a lot of what is going on here. They can recognize that Jesus is a mighty teacher, but that does not mean they will listen to Him.

There is another way that people often view Christ that is not addressed in the text, but has been very common throughout the history of the church and I think it plays a big role in our society today. If it is an error to call Jesus a good man and nothing more, if it is incorrect to deny His divinity, it is equally bad if we believe that Jesus is divine with all our hearts and yet firmly deny that He is also human. Why might this be a problem? If Jesus is not a real human being, if He just seems like He is human, or if He was just temporarily using a human body, we set ourselves up for another set of problems. If this is the case, we tend to only see the judgment of God rather than also seeing the love and compassion of God. We are all aware of the problems we face as human beings: temptations, shortcomings, mistakes. If Jesus is only God but not also man, His teaching only serves to amplify our feelings of inadequacy. Now God has not only condemned our insufficiency from far away, He has come to earth to condemn us again. We all know we fall short of the words of Christ, we do not always need to be reminded to that painful fact.

If Jesus is not a human being with a nature like ours, if, when the Son of God took on flesh and dwelt among us, He took on some kind of humanity different than our own, then He has absolutely no idea what it is like to live as broken people in a broken world. If this is what we believe, then it is very easy for us to dismiss what Christ has to say. If we do not believe that God has crossed over the huge gap between God and humanity and entered into our broken reality in order to heal and redeem it, then Christ can be fully God and still have no good news for us. We can call Jesus divine and still not ever pay attention to a word he says. His words remind us, after all, that we are not yet what we should be.

I have laid before you a handful of different ways that people have thought of Christ, both during His ministry and since. I ask you this morning, “What think you of Christ?” But before you answer that, I want to remind you of something. Sometimes, what we think we believe about Jesus is not what we really believe in reality. How can this be? If we believed something about Jesus, wouldn’t we know it? Not necessarily. There are many times when our actions show what we really believe is different than what we say we believe. For example: There are many people in our country today who adamantly profess that they believe in the inherent goodness of humanity. They believe that human beings are basically good and so we should trust that goodness. And yet, their actions show that they do not really believe it. When they leave their houses, they lock them. When they park their cars downtown in the cities, they lock them and turn their car alarms on. They vote to create certain laws because they know that, if the law did not restrain people, they would take advantage of them. In spite of all the professions to the contrary, anyone who lives like that does not really believe that human beings are inherently good.

So, when you think about what you think about Christ, do not only think back to your days in Sunday School, where you learned to say all the “right” answers. Do not just say, “I think that Jesus is the savior of the world.” Reflect on whether you really live that way. Let me read to you an excerpt from John Wesley’s journal while he was in America, before his experience at Aldersgate. He had just met with a Moravian pastor named August Spangenberg and they were talking about salvation. “He said, ‘My brother, I must first ask you one or two questions. Have you the witness within yourself? Does the Spirit of God bear witness with your spirit, that you are a child of God?’ I was surprised, and knew not what to answer. He observed it and asked, ‘Do you know Jesus Christ?’ I paused and said, ‘I know he is the savior of the world.’ ‘True,’ replied he; ‘but do you know he has saved you?’ I answered, ‘I hope he has died to save me.’ He only added, ‘Do you know yourself?’ I said, ‘I do.’ But I fear they were vain words.”

John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, who was to become such a mighty evangelist and Christian leader, first had to come to grips with the fact that he did not, deep down inside, believe what he thought he did. It was only once he was able to see this fact that he was able to cry out to God and really come to know Jesus.

I encourage you, as we prepare to share the Lord’s Supper together, to think a bit about not only what you learned were the “right” things to think about Jesus, but to think about how that impacts the way you live. You may find, upon reflection, that you really believe that He is not only the savior of the world, but your savior, who died for you, who loves you and wants to save you. You may find that you really believe deep down inside that the good news is really true, that you indeed have been redeemed from bondage to sin and death. However, if you find that you have been simply repeating the answers you learned in Sunday school without them really sinking in and changing you at the very core of your being, I beg of you, do not despair. Do not allow yourself to be dominated by feelings of unworthiness. Even if you have never yet grasped from the depths of your heart that Jesus is really the savior who died for you, I assure you that it is true and that you need not wait another minute to allow the Lord to radically transform your life. As you come forward to receive the bread and cup, do not dwell on your shortcomings, but ask God to give you whatever He will and be open to receive it. Let today be the day that you encounter the Lord, again or for the first time. Let us pray.

AMEN