John 7:25-39

07/05/09
John 7:25-39
Hudson UMC

I am always so fascinated to read the Bible and see how amazingly real it is. By that, I don’t mean I am amazed at how remarkably scientifically accurate it is. What I mean is that I am always so impressed with the fact that the Bible does not try to paint a sugar-coated picture of humanity. There are some other sacred texts of other religions that just seem faker than fake when you read them. You read through them and are constantly thinking to yourself, “This just isn’t how people are. How can I believe this when it seems like it has nothing to do with reality?” The folks that we read about in the Gospels are not caricatures, they are not cardboard cutouts, but real people. I can relate to just about everyone I read about in the Gospels, either because of my own experience or because of people I’ve known.

The thing I want to emphasize about the people in this passage is that they seem to have gotten a bunch of ideas about who God is and who the Messiah would be that did not come from the Old Testament. They have all kinds of ideas that they picked up, not from God’s own revelation of God’s self to them, but from other people or from their tradition, “how we’ve always done things and thought about them.” They had inherited a way of thinking about things that did not necessarily line up with what God had to say about it.

Let me give you an example. We read that there is a tension in the minds and hearts of the people in Jerusalem. On the one hand, they see that Jesus, despite being hated by the religious leaders, is not being actively persecuted at the time and that the Pharisees are giving a kind of silent approval to what He is doing. They began to wonder, “Can it be that the authorities really know that this is the Messiah?” Maybe, just maybe, this man Jesus, who speaks with such authority and has been rumored to have performed many mighty miracles in Galilee could be the Messiah. However, they have their serious doubts. “But when the Messiah comes, no one will know where he is from.”

The question I have is, where in the world did they get that idea? From the Old Testament? That kind of idea is not found anywhere in the pre-Christian Jewish Scriptures. I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, so I won’t say that they just made it up, but I don’t see anything anywhere in the previous revelation from God that would make them assume that nobody will know where the Messiah is from. I am not alone. The great commentators on this text throughout the history of the church are equally baffled. There is just no evidence from the Jewish Scriptures that would lead to this conclusion. What probably happened was that some great leader somehow came to that conclusion and then taught it to everyone who followed him. Eventually, it became so popular that people accepted it without question. Everyone they knew believed it, so it must be true.

This is a really big deal because this small misunderstanding of their own Scriptures hindered a bunch of people from giving Jesus a fair chance. It was not as though Jesus was not as the Scriptures predicted, but that He was not as the people predicted. The people had invented an image of what the Messiah would look like that was simply not true. They could insist that nobody would know where the Messiah came from with all their might but it would not make it true. What they needed to do was develop ways of thinking about God that were in line with how God actually is instead of trying to force God into their own way of thinking.

The other major way that the people misunderstand Jesus in our passage for today is different, but deeply related. This group of people had this to say. “When the Messiah comes, will he do more signs than this man has done?” What they are saying is that this might actually be the Messiah. After all, if Jesus was not the Messiah, it would mean that the real Messiah would have to perform even more miracles. However, this is a puzzling thing to say. Most of the time, we read this statement in light of the many miracles we see in Matthew, Mark and Luke. You may recall me saying that the Gospel according to John has fewer miracles than any of the other Gospels. In fact, we have only really encountered about five miracles in John. What is more is that only one of those, the healing of the man who had been crippled for thirty-eight years, was done in Jerusalem. This is why I think this statement is interesting. Jesus has not done all that many miracles in this area. In fact, He had even just said in our last passage, “I performed one work, and all of you are astonished.”

The point is that the people in Jerusalem were fixated on the miracles of Christ. To them, it was a proof, indeed the proof that Jesus was the Messiah. However, if we look at the actual words of Christ, if we look, not at the things we like in the stories but what God Himself has actually said and taught, we find that Jesus does not seem all that excited about miracles. He does not use them as the final proof that He is who He says He is. Jesus will even tell His disciples in chapter fourteen that they will do even greater works than He did and we know from the book of Acts that they did. The point is that, even by the Messiah’s own testimony, there are others who will do more miracles.

When Jesus tries to justify Himself to the people, when He tries to show that He is doing the work of God, He does not tend to point to the miracles. Usually, He points to His connection with His Father. He does the same thing now. Jesus explains that the problem isn’t that people know where He is from but that they do not know the Father. Instead of promising to do more miracles in Jerusalem, He takes the entire issue and places it on a different foundation. He is not concerned with what the people know, or rather, what they think they know, He is not concerned with how many miracles He does in their midst. He is most concerned that the people know the Father and receive the Spirit. He culminates His teaching at this time by crying out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’”

Just the other day, several of the men from this church were putting together a stone wall as part of a project to improve the appearance of the front of the church. The thing that took the longest was getting the bottom layer of stones firmly in place and precisely level. The reason for this is that, if your foundation is off by even a little bit, you will cause a lot of problems down the road. It is easy to have a weak or a bad foundation. It takes time and care to have a good one.

The reason why I bring this up is because this is, in so many ways, what Jesus is doing with the people in our text. He is helping them to build on a better foundation. What they people were saying showed that they had a foundation, not built on the sure reality of God, but upon the arbitrary creation of humankind. They had built their views of God, of humanity, and of the relationship between the two, but had not taken the time and care to ensure that they were being built on a good foundation. They had built up their theological wall, but it was full of cracks and was very weak. Jesus came to firm up that foundation.

But you know, we are not all that different today. Most of us, unless we are being very careful, pick up most of what we believe about God from our culture, rather than from God’s own self-revelation to us. We pick up ultimate beliefs about God, humanity and the relationship between the two from popular quotations (“God helps them who help themselves”), songs (“All we are is dust in the wind”), and philosophy (including particular understandings of God’s love and power). We can search through the Old and New Testaments, and we can find no trace of these ideas. We have somehow managed to invent them and pass them on without ever realizing that we are quietly making God in our own image. What makes this so sneaky is that so many people believe it so we convince ourselves that it must be true, even if God Himself tells us otherwise. We find that we tend to hold what we want to believe about God must deeper than what God wants us to believe about Him.

The other major problem that the people in Jerusalem had was an emphasis on things that God has not emphasized. They emphasized miracles when Jesus didn’t. That doesn’t mean that the miracles were not important, only that they were something that was very much secondary, rather than the main point. Again, sadly, we tend to live in this same kind of reality today. Most Americans, at least within the Mainline Protestant tradition, are not fixated on miracles, so our situation is a bit different. Conservative Christians in our culture tend to focus very closely on having correct doctrine, or correct ultimate beliefs about God, and a particular way of life, marked by personal responsibility. Liberal Christians tend to balk at that kind of rigid definition of the Christian life, but they end up falling into the same trap, only the beliefs they want people to hold are different and the life they want you to live is different.

The fact of the matter is that Jesus was not first and foremost interested in our statements of faith as we can write them down on a piece of paper or which of a number of legitimate Christian lifestyles we engage in. All of our doctrines, all of the things we ultimately believe about God, about humanity and about the relationship between the two go out the window when we experience the life of God flowing inside us like rivers of living water. In the end, though what we believe is very important, it is not nearly so important as participating in the very life of God through Christ and in the Spirit. In fact, I can guarantee that not a single person who ends up in heaven will have absolutely perfect doctrine. We all have incorrect beliefs, but what matters is that we have the Spirit of God imparting real life inside of us.

Also, just like the miracles ended up being a secondary issue in ancient Jerusalem, the same thing is true about our Christian lives. It was not so much the miracles that mattered as much as the fact that the Lord over nature had come among human beings in power. The miracles were only the manifestations, the evidence that the one who created the universe and maintained His authority over all of creation was in their midst. In the same way, our changed lives are secondary. It is not so much our changed lives that matter as much as the fact that the God who changes lives has entered into our very being. The changed life is incredibly important and we cannot claim to believe in the God who changes lives if our lives are not changed, but the thing that matters, the thing that fills us with hope, the good news of God to the world is that God wants us to be a part of His life. We do not reach out to other people and say, “You can live a transformed life.” We joyfully proclaim, “God loves you, God died for you, and God wants you to have the very life of God in your heart.”

At the very end of our passage, the narrator steps in to say that, when Jesus was talking about rivers of living water flowing in the heart of the believer, “He said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive; for as yet there was no Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified.” There is this sense of unfulfilled promises here. Jesus is making a promise that the people were not yet able to claim. Christ had not yet died, been raised from the dead, and ascended to heaven to sit at the right hand of His Father and the Spirit had not yet been given. What is important to remember is that John, when he was writing this account of Jesus’ life, was in a different situation. John, the author of our text, was not waiting in anticipation, waiting for the Spirit to come. Indeed, John had been one of those few that had been empowered by that Spirit before anyone else. He is sharing this statement, not to say we need to keep waiting, but so we can rejoice that this is the reality we live in. We are indeed people who have received the Spirit; we already have the life of God inside of us; we already have these rivers of living water flowing in our hearts. We have received the promise, so let us go into the world and share it with others. Let us pray.

AMEN