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March 12, 2006
The Incarnation: A Revelation of Human Duties
Psalm 1 / Judges 6: 11-24
John 1: 1-14
March 12th, 2006
I have spent the better part of this week in a Catholic seminary north of Chicago reading Presbyterian ordination exams. These exams tested prospective pastors’ ability to use the language of the Old Testament, Hebrew, and the language of the New Testament, Greek.
I also read exams that had the objective of showing if the next wave of pastors knows something about Reformed theology and something about how the Presbyterian Church works, in big and personal kinds of matters. Reading these exams made me think back to when I wrote the same exams many years ago. I wonder what kindness was extended to me when I must have made a daunting exhibition of how little I knew.
I came back to my study Thursday evening and read the texts before us this morning and wondered, “How can I make relevant to a very busy people this amazing message that has nourished the Church for two-thousand years?”
This morning I begin with you a series of studies in the Gospel of John. It is a deep book. It tells us of God, of the Son of God, and how the Son of God blessed and blesses this troubled world He took part in creating. This Gospel breathes a spirit of wonder and of the love of God for this world. I want to follow the contours of the message as we read it.
We’re used to the word “Gospel.” It comes from the Old English word gödspell that meant “good news,” a translation of a Greek word meaning exactly that.
Before this term was attached to the first four books of the New Testament the apostle Paul used it in I Corinthians 15: 1. There he refers to it as “the good news which was good news-ed to you,” a very Hebrew kind of term. He drew this from perhaps his favorite among the Old Testament prophets, the Prophet Isaiah. In Isaiah 52: 7 we read, “How beautiful are the feet on the mountains . . . that bring good-tidings, who causes salvation to be heard, saying in Zion, ‘your God reigns.”
Each of the four Gospels tells of this unique reign of God where He presided from the cross over sin and death, conquering them in the Person of His Son, Jesus. So these four books are called “the Gospel according to Matthew, or Mark, Luke, and John.” Each of the four Gospels takes a different approach to the triumph of Jesus.
The Gospel of John was written for the benefit of early Christians who wanted to know more deeply how the coming of Jesus changed the shape of human life. They wanted to know more than the story of Jesus’ birth, life, death, and resurrection. They wanted to see behind the plan of God from the very beginning as it was unfolded in Jesus. Because if Jesus conquered sin and death, the two great tragedies of life, there was a lot more to Him than met the eye.
I was tempted to have us listen to the first part of the Book of Genesis as our Old Testament reading this morning because it starts describing the beginning of creation. But the Gospel of John goes back behind Genesis 1: 1. Genesis 1: 1 is probably best translated, “When God began to create heaven and earth . . .” but it does not describe the Beginning itself.
John’s Gospel gets back behind the work of creation to how God existed, as nearly as the human mind can comprehend. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Before creation began this is how God existed: there was the Word and there was God, and the Word was God. Before the beginning of this world, this Word, this God was already there. We might expect John to use the word “God” first, and then “Word,” that refers to the Son of God. But he starts by using the using the word that refers to the Son of God—perhaps to make sure we don’t think the Son was less eternal than the One he referred to as God.
You might wonder where the Holy Spirit was in this picture of God. But as yet the doctrine of the Trinity as we understand it from all of Scripture waited to be explained. John gets to this a bit later on.
For now what is important is that we understand that this Jesus about whom Matthew and Luke tell His amazing birth story, was God, the same God who created the world. John wants us to look at Jesus with the awe He merits—though a word deeper than awe is really called for.
Awe, wonder, mystery, and amazement, silence must always be a part of our trust in Jesus. After His name became well known and indeed became a buzz-word in Christianized western culture, Jesus was domesticated. Jesus is sometimes thought of as a long-haired hippi do-gooder, devoid of mystery, a mere counter-culture figure. Somehow Jesus was adopted and given a different kind of domestication by more traditional polite society. It’s remarkable how Christians may put on a long face suggesting they think well of Jesus, while doing the opposite of what He asked of His friends. This is part of Jesus’ domestication.
When we read slowly those opening lines of this Gospel we are reminded that before we start to say anything about Jesus, let’s get in the right frame of mind. Awe. Wonder. Mystery. Amazement. Even speechlessness. Because how does one describe what eye has not seen nor can see?
I chose the Old Testament lesson Mike read for us because it seems to describe an appearance of the Son of God to Gideon, one of the most saintly of the judges of ancient Israel. In Judges 6: 12 we read this “angel” or “messenger” said to Gideon, “the Lord is with you.” Gideon addresses this “angel” as Lord, which makes us wonder if this was an appearance of the Son of God before He entered human history as the baby born to the Virgin Mary. “The Lord is with you,” is what the angel Gabriel said to Mary, Jesus’ mother in Luke 1: 28. In fact, when this heavenly visitor called Gideon a “might man of valor,” it was similar to the angel’s word to Mary, “O favored one.”
This Old Testament story lets us see one glimpse of God’s on-going interest in the human story when His specially chosen people, Israel, was in jeopardy. The Israelites were God’s vehicle to bring the Messiah. Their future had to be preserved when it seemed they were about to be destroyed. When John tells us “the Word became flesh,” the particular flesh that was chosen was important; it was flesh that descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the family line chosen to bless the whole world.
The one who wrote this Gospel is referred to as “the beloved disciple.” He among all the disciples seems to have had that thoughtful disposition that realized most that something far more than met the eye was being unfolded in the life of Jesus. He wrote, “We saw His glory, full of grace and truth.” John seems to have recognized this from the outset so that he was always near Jesus, watching quietly. And at the Last Supper, sensing the extreme awesomeness of the moment he even leaned on Jesus as he ate.
The same disciple of Jesus wrote four other books in our New Testament: I, II, & III John, and the Book of Revelation. Looking at the sweep of these other books alongside the Gospel of John I see the concern of Jesus’ beloved disciple to let all people attracted to Jesus know something of the majesty of Jesus so that they could be open to how wonderful God’s project was and is with this world.
But at the same time John’s Gospel tells what God has done, it puts a huge emphasis on what we must believe and do. Jesus did not come that we should sit and stare at Him. Indeed, let us do that. But we must take to heart the things He taught, and do them. If our faith is simply a matter of staring wide-eyed at Jesus, it is defective. As God gave Adam and Eve something to do at creation—as well as to walk and talk with their Creator, so Jesus gave those who walk and talk with Him something to do. We remember this often as I remind you that Jesus told His disciples, “You are my friends if you do what I command you.”
But Jesus intended more for us than giving Him due reverence and obeying Him. Jesus came that we could have “abundant life.” That is, life that brims with joy, with goodness, with a radiant delight that goes beyond our idea of happiness. But God will force no one into finding the wonderful life. He dangles it in front of us.
We might think that if God’s project in Jesus was to give us abundant life, He might have compelled us to accept it. When a Donald Trump wants to do something, he bulldozes everything in his way to get it done. Not so God. Having given us the gift of freedom, a taste, a reflection of His unlimited Divine freedom, God wanted our participation in this re-creating act. He wants our trust, our simple trust first. Obedience comes later. And with trust and obedience comes this “abundant life.”
God might have made us like elephants and horses that seem to live by a common code for their species. There are variations of personality among horses and elephants, but there is nothing like the variety of behavior that human beings exhibit.
Elephants don’t produce a few Mother Theresas, lots of indifferent, selfish people, a few Hitlers and Stalins, and then some grumpy dudes that make bombs to strap onto their big tummies to blow-up other elephants they don’t like. Horses don’t devise schemes of enslaving other horses. They don’t torture other horses to make the point clear who’s da boss. Only human beings exhibit these strange varieties of behavior, from doing these horrid things to doing the stuff of sainthood.
This is because we human beings were created in the image of God. The contours of God’s image are there in us all, able to be filled more and more with His goodness, or able to be filled more and more with evil. It is human beings, not elephants or horses that have created the global darkness that both insists on staying dark and cries out for some light to see the way ahead.
Jesus’ day was a dark day. John’s day was a dark day. Ours is a dark day too. This peaceful, restful city of West Lafayette isn’t the measure of this world, you know. Isaiah had written, “The people who walked in deep darkness have seen a great light.” He looked ahead and wrote confidently as though it had already happened.
During the last years of Jesus’ life the worst of the Roman procurators ruled Palestine. It was a period of great darkness when Jesus was born to give light.
John the Baptist spoke of Jesus as a light very different from every other light. Not only was He was the true light, but He was a light that shines into every human being. All other kinds of light have a very limited area they can illuminate. We don’t know how the Son of God illumines every human being born, but we have it here in the Gospel, the Word of God, that this is what the True Light not only did but does. This gives us hope. Jesus’ light still shines into every baby that is born.
Who was John the Baptist? He wasn’t a Baptist, of course, or a Methodist, or a Presbyterian. He was called John the Baptizer or the Baptist because he became well known for all the people he baptized. People then had never heard of this baptism John offered.
His baptism was different from what Christians today do. The baptism we offer is a sign and seal of God’s promise of salvation made to those who have trusted in Jesus, and to their children, if the parents request this. John’s baptism did not have anything specifically to do with Jesus. It was a sign that all sorts of people wanted to identify with, of turning from bad behavior that displeased God and that made a ruin of society. Pharisees and Sadduccees, that is Jewish leaders, as well as Roman soldiers and the legal thieves known as tax-collectors would stand in line for John to dip them beneath the waters of the Jordan River.
How embarrassing to a Pharisee, a strict constructionist of the Law of Moses, to admit that inwardly he was as corrupt as a cruel Roman soldier. How humiliating for a Sadduccee, an aristocrat, a member of the priesthood, to stand behind a thieving tax-collector to get his chance to be baptized by this strange, wild-looking man, John, son of the priest Zachariah.
John carried out a very important preliminary function before Jesus could say, “The Kingdom of God has come.” John leveled out society, bringing down the high and mighty to the level of those who knew they were sinners.
Why? Because in the Kingdom of God there is no one better or higher than another. In the Kingdom of God, Jesus later would say harlots and tax collectors would come before people that thought they did pretty good. In fact in the Kingdom of God there are no grown-ups; we’ve got to become as naïve and trusting as little children, who listen wide-eyed when a pastor tells a children’s sermon.
We don’t know how John got into the business of baptizing. Baptizing like this was something the Essenes did, a reclusive sect of the Jews. But not the kind of Jews around whom John would have grown up. He had an odd birth, much as Isaac, Abraham’s first son did, to a mother, Sarah, who was old and had never given birth to a child. His start was much like the Old Testament prophet Samuel, whose mother too was barren, and like Samson’s, the judge who was susceptible to the wiles of women, and whose death accomplished more for his people than his life. John was this enigmatic kind of person.
He is particularly noteworthy for us because of how he saw his relationship to Jesus, who was his younger cousin. “I am not worthy to untie His shoe strings.” And so the Gospel of John begins. This morning I think all I hope you may carry from these remarks is to sense the wonder of the tale we are about to hear. I want you to look at your life, as I do mine, in the shadow of the light that is cast by Jesus. His light shines on you, giving your life a significance beyond our ability to understand. In verse 12 we read this morning, “As many as received Him, who believed on His name, He gave power to become children of God.”
Public Television recently offered an intriguing story of the sons of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, noting the privileges that are part of being sons in a royal family. Though Prince William may become King of England, you and I have a far higher royal identity in being adopted into the family of Almighty God. What difference does this make in how you see your own life, or how you look at anyone else in this place this morning? Think of that. Remember this: You are a prince, a princess in the family of the King of Kings, not the mixed-up House of Wonder. How then should you live? How then should I live? What a privilege to be a child of God. What dignity. What duties. What privilege. We owe it all to this Jesus, the Son of God—who for our sakes became just as we are that He might raise us up to this new life, unspeakable and full of glory.
Let us pray: O Lord God, impress on us this wonder that you so favored us to take on our human nature and then to give us your Divine, calling us your sons and daughters. And grant that we may live as children of a heavenly Father. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at March 12, 2006 09:30 AM