John 20:30-31

11/21/10

John 20:30-31

Hudson UMC

With this short, two verse passage, we end John chapter twenty and are left with only one more chapter to go before we are finished with John altogether.  You may all breathe a sigh of relief.  You might think that it is a little silly to try to preach a sermon based on only two verses, especially two such incredibly obvious verses like these.  “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book.  But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”  What’s the big deal, right?  John is telling us that there is more to say than just what he has written and that he wants us to come to believe like he did.  There is no mystery, there should be no confusion, we can just close the book and move on to new business, right?

It might seem that easy, and perhaps, as far as the text is concerned, it is that easy.  However, in light of the fact that we have had about two thousand years of church history and it seems that every single passage has been interpreted in every way possible, and even in some ways that you never would have thought were possible, it seems that this simple text actually has something to say to us.  As far as I am concerned, the point of this passage is simple and, if you walk away understanding it, I will be more than happy.  If you walk away understanding the text but not understanding why I made such a big deal about it, I can live with that, too.

Let me tip my hand so you can see where I am going with this.  What I am concerned to explore is that texts like this show us that John and the other New Testament writers make a distinction between what they tell us about and the telling of it, that is, the stories about Jesus are just that, stories about Jesus; they are not Jesus Himself.  This probably makes perfect sense.  The other thing that this text tells us is that those same stories of Jesus are not just stories, not just something to pass the time, to entertain us, or even to ask deep questions, but that they are made to communicate something to us, that there is a very real connection between the stories that they share and reality.

Now that you can see that this is where I am going, I want to say that if it were not for the long and complicated history of Western thought, a sermon like this one would be completely unnecessary; we could have just included this text with the one before it or the one after it and pass it by.  However, it is truly amazing how often people have made one of two really big mistakes.  The first of these mistakes is the collapsing our statements of the truth into the truth itself so that our statements are the truth in the fullest sense; the second is the completely separating our statements from reality.  There are probably at least a few of you who aren’t sure why people would make these two mistakes because they seem so completely counter-intuitive, and you are right, they are counter-intuitive.  And yet, these ways of thinking are not at all uncommon.

Let us start with the collapsing of the truth of our statements with the truth of reality.  Over the years, certain ways of speaking about the truths of Christian faith became more or less standard.  For example, everyone spoke of the Triunity of God by saying that God is “One Being, Three Persons.”  In particular, the Pope’s authority grew to an unbelievable height, where the Pope’s word was as authoritative as the Bible.  Before too long, the statements made by the Pope as statements began to be seen as carrying the weight of truth.  To put it in other words, the issue is not whether what the Pope says is true independently of his saying it, that is, whether it would have been true, even if the Pope never said it, but that it is true because the Pope said it.

Now, this sermon is by no means intended to bash the Catholics for two main reasons.  First, much of the Catholic Church has gotten much better around this whole issue.  The second reason is because it has been just as strong, if not stronger, within the Protestant tradition.  One of the things that set the Protestants apart in its early days was its absolute devotion to Scripture.  While the mainstream of the Protestants still affirmed the insights of the early church, there were those who questioned their use of non-biblical language.  For example, it was pointed out that the words “Trinity” and “consubstiatial” which is a Latin word that means, “Of one and the same being” do not appear in the Bible.  If they are not in the Bible, what business do we have using them?

There were many reasons put forward by the major Reformers as to why they had no problem using non-biblical terms, but my point is that there were people who said, “If the Bible doesn’t say it, it isn’t true.”  The only problem with this is that it insists on a very narrow interpretation of what the Bible says.  In this case, for the Bible to say something, it must say so clearly and directly.  The argument was that, since we do not find the phrases, “God is Triune,” or “Jesus is of one being with the Father,” in the Bible, they must not be true statements.  It must be noted that this way of thinking was opposed by Martin Luther, John Calvin and, most importantly for us Methodists, John Wesley.  At one point, Wesley was told that Christians should not read anything other than the Bible because truth can only be communicated in the words of the Bible, Wesley responded, “If we read nothing but the Bible, we should hear nothing but the Bible; and then what becomes of preaching?”

The danger here is that there becomes a strong connection between the truth and the words we use to speak of the truth.  The two things become so very close that they finally become utterly indistinguishable.  When we apply this to the gospel of John, for example, we find that we do not believe because the words on the page have directed us God, but because the text says we should believe.  A sure way to see if someone holds to this understanding of the relation of our words to reality is to ask them to explain a biblical idea in other words.  If they respond by saying that they can’t do that because only these words will do because they are the ones found in the Bible, they are probably unable to clearly tell the difference between the truth of our statements and the truth of reality.

The other mistake that we can make is if we completely separate our words from reality.  This is a harder idea to grasp because, for our entire lives, we have been told and we have experienced for ourselves that words mean things.  To think of our words as just floating in the air, not really meaning anything at all seems silly.  However, there have been many brilliant minds that have gone in this direction.

 There was a tremendously influential philosopher named Immanuel Kant who questioned whether we really ever could understand things as they are in themselves.  Instead, he suggested that we only ever know things as they appear to us and, since we can never know if things appear to other people as they appear to us, we can never know for sure if we are actually making contact with reality.  Before long, it was suggested that what we call the world outside of ourselves does not really exist at all but is merely the projection of our minds.  Things no longer have any meaning in themselves, or, if they did, we could never know it.  The only meaning that exists is meaning for us.

When it became more and more clear that our words do not have meaning in themselves but they acquire meaning in any given community (think, for example, of how slang develops), it was not a difficult thing to imagine that our words and statements do not have any real reference beyond themselves at all.  Everything we say, everything we hear, everything we read, and everything we experience, is simply an exploration of the depths of our own minds.  If we take this approach when we read something like the gospel of John, we do not believe because we are actually convinced that there is a God and that this God has actually come to meet us; instead, we believe because we feel better when we believe.  If someone were to prove that there is no God or that the Bible was completely unreliable, it wouldn’t matter because our faith is not dependent on facts, but on feelings.

So, if both these ways of thinking, while popular throughout Western history, clash with the gospel, what way of thinking would the gospel suggest to us?  What is interesting is that, when compared to all the brilliant thinkers and complicated ideas that have been shared throughout history, the gospel is amazingly simple.  I hope that, for most of you, when you hear me explain what passages like ours for this morning have to say about our words and statements, you aren’t surprised by any of it.  I am convinced that what the Bible has to teach us here is something that comes very naturally to us in our daily lives if we do not complicate it with a bunch of other stuff.

What does John tell us his purpose is in writing?  “These are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”  The goal of John’s gospel, and indeed, all of the Bible, is not that we might know a book really well, that we would get to know a lot of text, nor is it that we would be helped to explore the depths of our souls and come to self-fulfillment, but that we would come to know Jesus Christ and believe in Him, and, through believing in Him, that we would have life in Him.  John is saying that truth is something that lies beyond the text but that the text is meant to point us to that truth.

The relationship between the text of the Bible to the reality of Christ is the relationship between a sign and the thing that is signified.  Imagine that you are driving to Chicago.  At some point, you will see a sign that tells you that Chicago is fifty miles away.  If we make the first mistake we have been talking about, we would have to say that the fact that Chicago is fifty miles away is true because the sign tells us so, not because there actually is a city called Chicago that is actually fifty miles away.  If we make the second mistake, we would have to say, “There may or may not be a city called Chicago that is fifty miles away.  What I need to figure out is how this information helps me understand myself better.”

In this light, both of these ways of thinking are seen to be absurd.  When we see that sign, what do we conclude?  We conclude that, fifty miles from this sign, there is a city called Chicago.  We use the sign to confirm that we are, indeed, on the right road, but we also know that, even if that sign had not been there, Chicago would still have been fifty miles away.  The sign is good, but the city does not depend on the sign to exist.  To give two more examples, if I were to say that my Bible is burgundy or that the paper on which my sermon is printed is white, it would be true, but it would have still been the case, even if I hadn’t said so.

So, what does all of this mean to us today?  It means that, instead of thinking of the Bible as Jesus in book form, as you will find that some do, it seems that it is far more accurate to think of the Bible as John the Baptist in book form.  That is, in the Bible, we have sixty-six books, from different times and different authors, all of whom, in their own ways, are pointing away from themselves and toward God.  If you remember way back to the beginning of the gospel of John, you will recall that John the Baptist explains, referring to Christ, that “He must increase, but I must decrease.”  To insist on following John the Baptist rather than allowing him to direct us away from himself to Christ would be to pervert his message and to miss its point.  To insist on following the Bible in such a way that it keeps us from following the Triune God to whom it points would be equally foolish.

To draw on what John relates to us later in his book, in chapter fourteen, Jesus explains, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through me.”  If Jesus is indeed the only way to the Father, then there seem to be some ways that don’t lead to the Father that seem relevant to this topic.  If it is through Jesus that we come to the Father, it means that, though we learn about Jesus primarily through the Bible in the worshipping life of the church, it through the Jesus that the Bible bears witness to and not the Bible itself that we come to the Father.  If it is through Jesus that we come to the Father, then it is not through our own sense of self-fulfillment.  We indeed come to know ourselves more completely when we trust in Christ, but that is not an end in itself.  The life that we are directed to seek in the Bible is not a life of our own making, but a life that is in Christ’s name.

So, my encouragement to you is to not place your trust in any of the things that the world tells us are so important.  What really matters is not a text, nor our feelings, but the fact that the God of the universe, who created us and who loves us, has acted decisively to redeem us so that He might not be without us.  Not only this, but this same God has sent the Holy Spirit to dwell within us to renew us in the image of Christ so that having life in Christ’s name might not just be a nice thing to think about but would be a reality.

What will you gain if you memorize the whole Bible, but miss the God to whom it bears witness?  What good is it to feel personally fulfilled but to not know the God who is closer to you than you are to yourself?  Though we call this book we have been working our way through the gospel according to John, we need to remember that it was not signed.  The point is that, though we attribute the book to John, the son of Zebedee, the disciple of Christ, the author felt no need to acknowledge himself.  The point of this book, from beginning to end, is to direct us to Jesus.  John is successful only if we do indeed come to believe in Jesus and he has failed if we do not.  Let us respond in joy and faith because God has done so much and has loved us to the uttermost and will not let us go.  Let us pray.

AMEN