John 7:40-52

07/12/09
John 7:40-52
Hudson UMC

It is not very often that we have a passage from one of the Gospels that does not have Jesus saying even one word. When we look at passages where Jesus is completely silent, we sometimes have to do a little more work. When the Son of God speaks, we know that it is not just some guy flapping his gums but His words are the very words of God. But when other people speak, we have no guarantee that they are speaking the words of the Lord. In fact, sometimes we find that they say a whole lot of things that are not even close to being right.

Our passage shows us two different conversations, both taking place at the end of the festival of Booths and among two very different groups of people, the first one is happening among the crowd and the second one is among the chief priests and the Pharisees. There are two things that amaze me about these two conversations. First, they are extremely similar to one another and second, they are both equally confused about the truth.

The first conversation is among the people of the crowd. Apparently, the people just could not stop talking about Jesus after He had made such an astonishing speech earlier. Some of the people were convinced that He was the prophet like Moses that had been promised for over a thousand years. Others were convinced that He was the Messiah, the promised king who would save the people of Israel. However, there were some others were not so convinced. They said, “Surely the Messiah does not come from Galilee, does he? Has not the scripture said that the Messiah is descended from David and comes from Bethlehem, the village where David lived?”

What is amazing about this is that this second group of people, the ones who did not think the Messiah could come from Galilee, is so determined to discredit Jesus that they did not even bother to get their facts straight. Jesus was originally from Bethlehem. He was a descendent of David. The fact that He had grown up mainly in Nazareth and lived His life in the region of Galilee does not change the fact that this argument is fundamentally wrong. In any case, there was such a strong division among the people that we read that some of them wanted to go so far as arrest Him.

The second conversation was among the chief priests and Pharisees. This time, it was not simply a matter of personal opinion, but a question about how the law should be followed. One of the leading Jews, Nicodemus the Pharisee, stood up on Jesus’ behalf. Do you remember Nicodemus? He was the Pharisee that came up to Jesus at night back in chapter three and was told that he needed to be born again and that God so loved the world that He gave His only Son so that whoever should believe in Him might not perish but have eternal life. His encounter with Jesus must have made a deep impression on him because he seems to be the only one of the Jewish leaders who is sympathetic to Him. When everyone around him was losing their heads, he simply raised the question of due process. “Our law does not judge people without first giving them a hearing to find out what they are doing, does it?” The only response he got was a chewing out. “Surely you are not also from Galilee, are you? Search and you will see that no prophet is to arise from Galilee.”

This helps us to understand the hatred of the leaders. Jesus had not really broken any of the laws of the land. He had not actually done anything wrong, but He was hated. At first, we might think that the leaders just misunderstood Him. They might have really thought Jesus was a criminal and that they really needed to arrest Him for the public good. However, the way they respond to Nicodemus shows that they knew very well that Jesus was not really a public menace. Nicodemus had simply said that they, the teachers of the law, should follow the law. He didn’t say that he agreed with Jesus, he didn’t say that He wasn’t a criminal. All he said was that they should follow the law. The fact that the chief priests and Pharisees did not want to give Jesus a fair hearing shows that they know that they cannot get rid of Him legally.

I want to take a few minutes and talk about how significant it is that the people who are mad at Jesus are the chief priests and the Pharisees. Usually, the biggest enemies that Jesus has in the Gospels are the Pharisees, but who are the chief priests? What does it mean that the priests are also mad at Him?

The chief priests were almost entirely members of the group of leaders called the Saducees. The Saducees held the most power with regard to Temple worship. There are a few major differences in belief between the Pharisees and the Saducees. For example, Saducees, and very likely these chief priests, did not believe that there would be a general resurrection and the two parties disagreed to what extent they should be politically involved. What is perhaps the most significant way to describe these chief priests is that they were the religious conservatives at the time. They would only recognize the first five books of the Old Testament as authoritative Scripture. They took the law very seriously but they did not place much value on subsequent tradition. This means that they would not have had the problem of overvaluing the teaching of their ancestors like the Pharisees did, but it also means that they did not have nearly as clear an idea of who the promised Messiah would be since they did not consider the prophetic books of the Old Testament to be authoritative.

If the Saducees and chief priests were the religious conservatives, the Pharisees were the religious liberals. When we think about how tightly wound many of the Pharisees were and how legalistic they tended to be, it is hard for us to think that they were particularly liberal, but they were. They were the leaders whose worship included Temple sacrifices, but it was mainly centered around devotion to the Scriptures. Though most of the Israelites throughout history were centered primarily around the cultic worship at the Temple, the Pharisees came into being with a central idea that it is obedience to the law that is most important, not sacrifice. This marked a radical departure from most of Israel’s history, which would make them very liberal indeed.

The point I want to make by telling you all of this is that Jesus did not fit in with either the conservatives or the liberals. Both the Left and the Right were mad at Him and wanted to get rid of Him. Think about how fundamentally divided the conservatives and liberals are today in America. Just about every topic you can imagine: the war, abortion, homosexual marriage, health care, welfare, and stem cell research, just to name a few, have split our nation down the middle. It is so hard to get both the Left and the Right to agree on anything that it seems like it might be a miracle if it ever happens. This is the same kind of idea that we see in our passage. The conservatives and the liberals, the traditionalists and the radicals, people who cannot agree on hardly anything are united in their hatred of Jesus and their desire to get rid of Him.

Think about what this means. It means that Jesus’ message is completely out of the ordinary. If the conservatives hate Jesus and the liberals hate Jesus and the government hates Jesus, it means that we should think very carefully before we say that one entire group of people or another loves Jesus. I have met many Republicans who tend to believe that being a good Republican is one and the same as being a good Christian, that if you want to be a Christian, you had better be a Republican. To make sure that nobody thinks that I am only picking on Republicans, I have met Democrats that believe similar things. They think that, if you really want to be Christlike, you basically have to be a Democrat. This kind of identification of Christ with our secular ideologies is incredibly problematic. It is, in its own way, making God in our own image.

I think it is important to note that Christ is not against culture per se. Culture is not intrinsically evil. After all, when God became flesh and lived among us, He did so as a Jew, a member of ancient Israel and lived according to the culture of the ancient Jews. Paul tells us that Christ was “born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law.” If God was willing to live according to Jewish culture, it must not have been entirely evil. The same can be said of Gentile culture at the time, even though it was a Pagan culture. God desired that Gentiles would come to saving faith, even though they were not forced to become Jewish. This means that, even in the midst of Paganism, God does not entirely reject culture, but moves within it.

All that being said, however, when God enters into a culture, He changes it. Jesus stood against every aspect of Jewish culture that stood against the will of God. When the Gospel went out to the Pagans, the people were not allowed to continue in their pre-Christian way of life. There were ethical demands made on them, they had to give up their idols, they had to give up their selfishness, they had to submit themselves to a Gospel that, while it did not entirely overturn their culture, it still stood against it to redeem it.

This means that, even though it may be true that there is not a single culture that is entirely bereft of divine grace, it is equally true that there is not a single culture that is, on its own, unchallenged by Christian faith. This is every bit as true for us in suburban and rural America as it is among a tribe of cannibals. I want to highlight just a few ways in which the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ show us that some of the things we do in our culture are contrary to the perfect will of God and so ought to change the way we live.

The first thing I want to bring to your mind is the fact that the Jesus we call Lord was someone who not only taught that suffering love is the best lifestyle for us to engage in and that it will ultimately overcome evil, but lived it out at every moment of His life. This is the same Jesus who, when He was being nailed to the cross, cried out in prayer to His Father and said, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” How can this Jesus, this God in flesh, not stand against our culture of revenge that we cling to as a nation? How can a people who are always waiting to get back at those who have hurt them not be challenged by a God who willingly lays His life down for those who hate Him? It is a very serious thing.

A second example from the life of Jesus comes from the Gospel of John that we have spent so much time in. When Jesus spoke to the woman at the well, He was doing more than just being a nice guy. He was crossing every social barrier there was. He was a man speaking to a woman alone. He was a Jew speaking to a Samaritan. He was a person of the respected elite who was speaking to a woman who would have been at the very bottom of the social ladder. Jesus not only spoke with her, but He challenged her and brought the very life of God to her, liberating her from her self-destructive lifestyle and freeing her for joyful obedience. How does this stand against our tendency to segregate ourselves? Even if we do not actively and intentionally separate ourselves from those who are of different races or social status, do we not do so by where we choose to live, by who we choose to interact with? Are we willing to step into another world and help others as Christ has helped us? Are we willing to swallow our pride and serve the poor? Jesus did not wait for the woman to repent before He began the conversation, and neither should we.

The last image I want to draw your attention to is the cleansing of the Temple. Jesus stormed into the Temple and cleared out the money-changers, the sellers of animals and turned over the tables. He willingly and enthusiastically drove out everyone who was using the Temple of God for anything other than what God had set it apart for. How then, do we feel that God feels about our tendency as the American church to use the church as a social gathering with our own sacred cows and personal agendas instead of surrendering ourselves, our resources, our time, and our building to be used however God would use it and allow God to transform lives in our midst.

There are indeed many things in our lives and in the lives of others that God stands against. And yet, we must never forget the hope that is implied even in that serious challenge. God challenges us, not because He hates us, but because He loves us beyond measure. When we experience the challenge of God, it is not condemnation, but discipline. The writer of Hebrews puts it this way. “Endure trials for the sake of discipline. God is treating you as children; for what child is there whom a parent does not discipline? If you do not have that discipline in which all children share, then you are illegitimate and not his children.” We are challenged, not because God is against us but because He is so unbelievably for us that He wants to adopt us as children and make us more and more like His own Son. The good news of all this challenging stuff is that, by feeling our own inadequacy in the face of God, we show that God has absolutely not abandoned us. He strives with us, even when we fail over and over again because He thinks that we, broken and sinful creatures though we are, are worth it. We are the people that Christ died for. We are the people for whom Christ laid aside the glory of heaven, took our broken humanity upon Himself, lived as a human being surrounded by all the same kind of corruption that we live in the middle of, submitted Himself to be misunderstood, hated, mocked, and even murdered. And He did all this without a single complaint because we are worth every bit of it in His eyes.

And so, let us rejoice that we are not yet perfect because we are loved by the one who is perfect and will drag us kicking and screaming into the perfection of the resurrection and the new heaven and earth. Let our inadequacy remind us that the Lord is God and that we are dependent on Him. Let it always push us to let God rule in our lives ever more completely. And let your shortcomings bind you ever closer to the God who has mercy on the unrighteous. Let us pray.

AMEN