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January 28, 2007
Jesus, Stone of Help
I Samuel 7: 3-12/John 11: 32-44
January 28th, 2007
This morning I tried to recover for our children a wonderful Old Testament word that has become lost among Christians: Ebenezer. We know Ebenezer as the first name of the hero in Charles Dickens’ “Christmas Carol”, Ebenezer Scrooge. So we think that Ebenezer must be a by-word for coldness of heart, of stinginess. Christians don’t know this word so it has been removed in most hymnals from one of my favorite hymns, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing”.
But the name has quite an opposite sense than coldness of heart. Though there is some oddness to its happy meaning. In our reading from I Samuel 7, Ebenezer is called that because here and then the Lord miraculously delivered Israel from their dreaded enemies, the Philistines. God “thundered with a mighty voice that day against the Philistines and threw them into confusion . . . so Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Jesharnah and called its name Ebenezer, for he said, ‘Hitherto the Lord has helped us’.” Ebenezer means “stone of help.” Or as it is in Hebrew more specifically, “stone of the help.” It was one particular time of help Samuel had in mind.
The oddness comes when we look at the two other places in I Samuel where this place is mentioned. Ebenezer is first identified as the place where the Philistines defeated Israel, slaying thousands of Israelite troops. In the second, Ebenezer is where the Philistines capture the Ark of the Covenant. It seems that at Ebenezer twice the Lord did not help Israel. It is at the third and final mentioning of Ebenezer that it seems the place got its name from God’s help at that place. What’s going on?
On the one hand the place gets its name from God’s special help. On the other hand, the place is named that already before we learn that Samuel set up a stone to celebrate God’s deliverance. And God does not deliver His people there.
We see this kind of thing elsewhere in the Old Testament with regard to another place full of wonder. In the Book of Genesis long before Jacob was born we learn that Abraham pitched his tent near a place called Bethel. Yet in Genesis 28: 16 we read that Jacob re-named a place that used to be called Luz, Bethel, which means House of God, because God appeared to him in a dream. He woke from his dream and said, “God was in this place and I did not know it. This is none other than the house of God, the gate of heaven.” So he sets up a stone and calls the place Bethel, house of God. It was a custom in the time of the Patriarchs to set up standing stones as signs of God’s special presence there.
This is puzzling enough to beg for some explanation. Here is what I think is going on here. Genesis and I Samuel were written well after the events being described. In Genesis 12 Moses tells of Abraham at Bethel using the name by which this place was known in his own time, not in Abraham’s time. And in I Samuel we read of Ebenezer twice before we learn why the place was called Ebenezer because this was how the place was known ever after.
After Samuel set up a stone in the vicinity where God delivered Israel from its enemy, the Philistines, the people remembered God’s help to them there. It was for the people of Israel somewhat like the importance you and I put on special places. I think of what comes to mind when we hear the name Gettysburg. Who thinks of Samuel Gettys, who purchased land from Wm. Penn at this spot and built a tavern there in the mid eighteenth century? We think of the Battle of Gettysburg, and President Lincoln’s famed address there a hundred years later rather than of the man who gave his name to this place.
Ebenezer was the place where the Lord helped Israel in a special time of need! Indeed, you and I have places that we think of in this way. I set up no monument there, in fact the building has been torn down where I remember the night when I determined I wanted to be a Christian for real. I pass that spot near LaSalle St. in Chicago and there zooms to mind that night in March of the year 1961 when in great need for the mists of my life to clear I prayed so deliberately, “Lord, take my life. I want to be yours.” I was not the same person after this.
Any time Christians go to Bethany, a small town near Jerusalem they think, “This is where Jesus went to the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.” Here is where for four days Mary and Martha wondered why Jesus neglected them in their time of need. But then Jesus came and brought Lazarus back to life after lying in the cold stone tomb four days.
We began reading from this remarkable eleventh chapter of John’s Gospel at the place we left off last Lord’s Day. I chose as our Old Testament lesson this morning the passage of I Samuel mentioning the name Ebenezer, Stone of Help, because it connected so suggestively with the word stone in John 11. At first we read of the stone that was rolled in front of Lazarus’ tomb, blocking the entry way just as the stone that would soon thereafter block the mouth of the tomb where Jesus was buried.
Mary and Martha stood before that stone and wept. It seemed to represent Jesus’ failure to respond to their need. No stone of help here. There would have been no stone in front of that tomb if Jesus had only come when He was needed. That tomb would have remained empty. They would not have given that spot a second thought. But Jesus seemed to fail them in their time of need. That stone was a symbol to them of Jesus’ failure to help them, for a while.
My mind travels to the connection the Apostle Paul draws between Jesus and the stone from which God supplied the ancient Israelites with water.` Moses arrived again at Mt Horeb, the other name for Mt. Sinai where God gave the Law to Israel. There was no water. The people feared they would die of thirst. So God told Moses to strike the rock. Water gushed out of the rock. It was a stone of help.
Paul remembers this story and wrote to the Christians at Corinth, “That rock was Christ.” Paul refers to the story that developed among the Jews that this rock followed Israel in the desert. It was a sign of God’s help back then just as Jesus remains a sign for us of God’s help that pursues us wherever we are.
And so we confess and believe. Jesus said, “I will never fail you nor forsake you.” We cling to this promise in time of need.
But as I have heard various ones of you remind me in times of your distress, you wonder why God does not answer your cry for help. Where is Jesus when I need Him? This was the very question Mary and Martha asked. It was the question the Israelites asked when at Ebenezer they were crushed by their enemies and the Ark of the Covenant was stolen by the Philistines. Where is God, my Stone of Help, when I need Him most?
This is a serious matter for us when we have waited a long time, prayed a long time, and our prayers seem to fall on deaf ears in the heavens. I’m tempted to say that though God has put eternity in our hearts he has put the sense of time in our heads. And we try to juggle the two, trust in God ultimately—in God who does all things well, and trust in God now, when we have grown weary in our waiting and praying. Some people give up on God when no help comes. They read the psalmist’s question and answer, “From whence does my help come? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth.” And it sounds so good when times are good. But when we imitate the psalmist and call out to God in our distress, it’s as though prayer is an empty exercise.
Let me say I’m not immune to this same reflex. I look back over the years I’ve been a pastor and remember some long stretches of time when I felt I was walking in a wasteland. There have been some long years of waiting for God to lead me from the wilderness, difficult times, difficult people, when it was my duty still to get up in the pulpit on the Lord’s Day and speak cheerful, inspiring words that would enable my folk to face life with confidence in God’s presence. Every now and then I remember some of those long stretches of time. The promises of Scripture echoed as words in a canyon. “I am with you,” the words bounced off the canyon walls while no help came.
This kind of experience comes to most of us at one time or another. There are some for whom there seems no escape from it.
I have thought that some are “wired” in such a way that they’re capable of more optimism than others. There are some people who have a natural optimism, able to smile into a hurricane, rejoicing that there is still a half glass of water left. No worries, as the Australians say. And there are others who face immense good fortune and see a half-empty glass. Pessimism. Gloom. It’s a matter of perception.
And there are still others who are worn down by circumstances. It’s not a matter of seeing a glass half full or half empty. They have hurt for so long, faced harshness from a spouse or a boss for so long, faced illness for so long, been on the brink of financial ruin so often for so long. They turn to their faith in God with trust that somehow continues on even though it has grown thin as a thread. I’m speaking of some here this morning.
I marvel at how life seems to go so smoothly for some and so precariously for others. And it is not of their deserving. It just happens that way. And it is the same Jesus, the same Stone of Help, the same rock to which we all turn. Some times it is as it was for Israel that God delivered them from the Philistines, and at other times the Philistines got the best of them. It is as it was for Mary and Martha with Jesus; He didn’t show up until four days after Lazarus was dead.
May I say that I have learned never to give up, never to draw the curtain and say I will not trust in God any more. It is helpful to read of the experience of others who waited every bit as long as I have in situations still more perilous. I have seen that our solutions, the ones we pray for, may not be the best solutions. Our inward needs are far greater than our outward needs. When I read the biography of George MacDonald, for example, and discover that he faced the utter rejection of his congregation at Arundel, and that his family lived in dire want afterward. And he had no idea that he would turn out to be one of England’s greatest Victorian novelists and most beloved preachers. He had no idea that today people would buy his stories and that C.S. Lewis would bring him fame by calling attention to his place in his own legendary career. All he had was the present. All he could see was the moment of his distress. I think of Edith Stein, a Roman Catholic nun born a Jew—killed because of this by the Nazis. Where was her stone of help?
We now think MacDonald and all like him wise for keeping on trusting in God. We now admire him as a very wise and good man. Perhaps God so made him that he could only respond this way to his hard times. But I don’t think God wires us to respond this way. We all have the same wires in our heads and hearts. We forge our own outlooks. It’s just that some dare to trust God, determine to obey God in the small disappointments and are fortified for the large ones. Sometimes the outcome of this trust in God is more favorable circumstances. Sometimes this is not the case.
We don’t trust in God in order for things to get better. It’s not a means to an end, a way to pull the strings on the Divine puppet. “Faith is the evidence of things not seen.” Heidelberg Catechism question 1, “In life and death”, Christians in famine and disease ridden parts of Africa are grateful to remember. Still keep on.
So I urge you not to give up in whatever your trial is. But I also urge us as a congregation to be responsive to one another. In order to be responsive to one another we cannot be cut off from each other. Some of us need to see that God has a place for us not merely to find encouragement, to find peace in a church agreeable to our theology and preferred style of worship. God has put us here to be part of His on-going work of grace in behalf of others.
I urge you to come together here in the various ways we come together. Come pray with us on Wednesday morning. Come to Sunday School and listen not only to the lesson but also to the people who need you to see into their hearts so that you can be part of God’s supply to them.
The on-going lesson of Israel was of a people God did not give up on though they faced centuries of distress. The on-going lesson of Mary and Martha was that Jesus did come and raise Lazarus from the tomb. And you and I have an on-going story too. Don’t abort the story by giving up on God. Don’t neglect to take your place in God’s way of caring for others. The psalmist wrote, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” He did not say how God provides this refuge and strength. Sometimes it is miraculously supplied. At other times God uses the method He intended when He created us not only for Himself, but also for one another.
I pray God may deliver us in our times of trial and wish He would not make us wait. I hope you will and that I will continue to trust long after trusting has seemed futile. And then I pray that when God answers our prayers in our time of need we may be able to hear and recognize how near and gracious God is.
O Lord, our Stone of Help, the Rock of our salvation, grant to us grace to realize how very true are your promises, and how near and present You are. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 10:35 AM
January 21, 2007
Trusting Jesus When the Chips Are Down
Deuteronomy 1: 1, 9-18/John 11: 1-4, 17-27
January 21st, 2007
I have never played Poker, but I remember the term, “when the chips are down.” I know that it is not a good thing when the chips are down. I think it means the pile of chips you’re winning is down, and you’re losing the game. When your stack of chips is up, you’re winning; down, you’re losing.
We read the Bible so many years after any part of it was written to get guidance from God on how to live today. Our Old Testament reading this morning might have been chosen to give us wisdom in how to “run” a church, not only when the chips are down, but all the time. Choose responsible people to help the pastor lead the congregation in following God’s ways.
But I chose this passage for Moses’ remarks about when the chips were down, when he found disappointment in his task. The leadership sometimes stood against him. Even his brother and sister led revolt against him. How many biographies of pastor’s I’ve read that included sad reports of opposition, even revolt in the congregation.
When we run into difficulty with people at church it reflects on God. There were moments in Moses’ life with Israel when he stood between them and God. It was a most difficult position. We’d like to think that fine and happy relationships might be the ordinary state for God’s people walking in God’s ways. But Paradise remains around the next bend in the road.
In the lesson from John’s Gospel we read this morning we see extreme disappointment with the Son of God on the part of two of His best friends. They knew Jesus would rally to their need immediately when He learned their brother Lazarus was very ill. After all, they were close friends with Jesus.
But He could scarcely have let them down more. Jesus arrived at the graveside four days after Lazarus was buried. Talk about disappointment with God! I’m not sure they knew Jesus’ full theological description as the Nicene Creed puts it, completely God and completely man, but they knew His works were the work of God. Who but God can heal all kinds of sick people, feed masses of hungry people using minute amounts of food. He could even raise the dead.
When the chips were down Moses, Mary, and Martha didn’t find God leaping to their rescue. They trusted in God with the chips down, but He didn’t leap to rescue them in a timely way. Let’s look more closely at these Bible accounts that were given to us for our instruction.
First we read from the Book of Deuteronomy Moses’ reminiscence of how things had gone with him and the people of Israel as he neared the end of his life. He looks back and says, “I said to you [way back forty years ago] I am not able alone to bear you . . .How can I bear alone the weight and burden of you and your strife?” It was the strife in particular that got him down.
Moses dictated or wrote this second book, a reminiscence of his forty years with Israel that we call the Book of Deuteronomy [which means Second Law] from the east side of the Jordan River. He looked across the Jordan at the Promised Land we now know as the nation of Israel, knowing he’d never step foot on it. This was a heavy loss for him we can imagine.
When we listen to the haunting Negro Spiritual “Deep River, my home is over Jordan,” it is the view of Moses looking across into a land on which he would never set foot. The American slaves who were brought to this continent from their homes far away in Africa read the story of Moses and recognized that the great Law Giver of the Jewish people suffered a plight like their own. The theme of the Exodus has meant a lot to African Americans. How the forbears of recent generations of African Americans longed for freedom on the other side of their Jordan River. How they longed for something that would come to their children generations later. They could only dream about it. Were it not for great people like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., that Jordan would not have been crossed till years later.
Moses, the man of God, who went up to Mt. Sinai and received the Ten Commandments on two tablets of stone, who established the pattern of worship Israel would follow for years to come, was denied the right to enter Canaan. Why? Three times in the early chapters of Deuteronomy Moses tells Israel that God held it against him on their account so that he did not get to set foot in the land God promised to Abraham. He was blamed for what they did even though his personal life was a spectacular exhibit of closeness to God. In His personal disappointment that is echoed in the Book of Deuteronomy was due to the continual difficulty he had with the Israelite people. Many generations later Moses would be venerated nearly to the point of idolatry. But within his own lifetime there was continual antagonism, rejection, and even revolt led by his brother and sister.
Not only that, but also Moses thinks back and remembers He had to contend with God as well as the Israelites. The predicament of God becoming weary of Israel to the point of planning to wipe them out as a people put him in a terrible fix. We read that Moses argued with God and changed God’s mind about this. What kind of Ultimate Being is it that a man can debate with and win? “What kind of God are you? Moses must have wondered. Are You an Ultimate being? Are you like we are, a Man writ large in the heavens?
Well, part of the interest of the strange passages that tell of Moses’ argument with God is that it gives us a clue to what was involved when God created Adam in His image and likeness. Yes, we are like God, and yes God is something like we are.
Though we find it scandalous to imagine that God the Creator of everything, whose mercy is from everlasting on those who fear Him, can change His mind out of disgust when His people show how badly they need His mercy, the Bible does not blush to tell us this. God got tired of remembering that, as the Psalmist put it, “We are dust.” I intend no irreverence in saying this. The Bible teaches it.
Moses was in a terrible predicament. He did not doubt that God existed, but wondered what kind of God could on the one hand have the power to create heaven and earth with all that is in them and beyond them, and on the other hand vacillate in His mind about His plan set forth in the promise to Abraham centuries before?
Sometimes you and I are puzzled by things. The way we expect God to be is defined by how God “lets things happen.” I hear Christian friends ask, “What is God doing in your life?” I know they mean mostly, “What good stuff is happening for you?” Suppose I answer, “God is testing me terribly right now.” Maybe if someone asks you, “What is God doing in your life?” and you answer, God is tormenting me,” they’d reply, “No, it’s not God tormenting you. It’s the devil.” Or maybe they’d think, “You’re reaping what you sowed.”
But Moses was not reaping what he sowed. And it was not the devil after him. It was God testing his mettle when he was given the task of being the mediator between Israel and their God. These were not made-up tests, but real ones. The people did not need to be instructed to give Moses trouble or to disobey God’s commands. Israel’s behavior has its parallels in our own.
In our finest moments we think how lovingly God is in control. But when life becomes hard, we wonder about God. I have heard some of you speak to me your sorrow at how things have gone for you. The trials that have come to you have come unearned, it seems, or you’re getting worse than you deserved.
Indeed, in the Bible itself we read that haunting question, “Why do the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper?” It is a theme echoed in the Psalms. Where is God when it hurts? a popular Christian writer asked in a book not long ago.
Before proposing an answer to this that I hope may be helpful, let’s turn to the other passage of Scripture we read this morning.
We read again part of the familiar story of the death of Lazarus, and Jesus’ interactions with him and his two sisters, Mary and Martha. These two women, very dear to Jesus, thought they were playing with a “stacked deck” as they saw their brother become very ill. Most people gave up on life in those days when terminal illness hit. But they had Jesus on their side. He loved them. They loved Him. He’d take care of Lazarus’ illness. Lazarus would soon be in the pink of health.
In the next chapter of John’s Gospel, which describes something that happened later—is mentioned here as a clue to how close Jesus was to this family. Mary showed her affection to Jesus very tenderly by anointing his feet with expensive ointment and wiping them dry with her hair. Her reasons seems to be different from the gratitude that made the unnamed woman in Luke 7 care for Jesus in much the same way in a far different setting. We don’t know that Mary was a conspicuous sinner, showering on Jesus her gratitude for forgiveness. She was simply a uniquely close friend.
John mentions this later act of affection here to help us recognize the intensity of the affection that passed between Jesus and this family in better times.
But look at how oddly Jesus responded when he heard Lazarus was very ill. In effect Jesus seemed to suggest, “He’s not all that sick.” He kept on doing whatever he was doing two more days. It is so odd to read in verse five: “When he heard that he [Lazarus] was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.” If you love someone, don’t you jump at the chance to help them in their time of need? What kind of love was this from Jesus? The disciples must have thought, “Jesus knows Lazarus isn’t as bad off as his family imagines. It’s just a passing flu or a cold. He’ll improve. Mary and Martha are a bit hyper.”
All the while in the next few verses we learn that Jesus knew full well that Lazarus was very ill. Oddly Jesus told His disciples, “Lazarus is dead and for your sake I am glad I was not there [to heal him while he was still alive.]
Well, Jesus and His disciples got to Bethany four days after Lazarus had died. Meanwhile Mary and Martha had watched their brother sink rapidly. They saw him lapse into a coma and die, knowing that if Jesus had come right away their brother would not be edging toward death. What kind of friend was this on whom they had showered such intimate care—opening their home to Him and His disciples, treating them to hospitality as they’d extend to their own family.
Finally, they heard that Jesus was coming. In deep disappointment Mary, who would later anoint Jesus’ feet, sat at home. She didn’t go to meet Jesus. What was she thinking? What kind of friend is Jesus? But Martha, her sister, ran to meet Jesus. She said the obvious, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
What kind of consolation was it to hear Jesus’ reply, “Your brother will rise again.” She found no consolation now in the doctrine of the resurrection at the last day. She ran to get her sister, Mary and told her quietly, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” She didn’t call Jesus, “Lord,” but “teacher.” Mary came quickly, overwhelmed with disappointment in Jesus. But she speaks to Him still as she had before, “Lord if you had been here my brother would have not died.”
It is at this point that we see one of the most moving images of Jesus, the Man as well as of Jesus, God made flesh who could bring to life that which was dead before. In a moving passage John tells us that when Jesus saw Mary crying, and others with her, He was moved in his spirit and troubled. Then the shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept.” Jesus wept. Why? Is it not because even though He knew all the power that resided in His word, in His touch, aspects of His Deity, He also knew the full weight of sorrow—theirs and so His too.
We know what follows. Jesus brings Lazarus to life again. But we also know that Lazarus did not live forever after that. Before Lazarus and his sisters would die, Jesus Himself would suffer abandonment by His heavenly Father, and He would go to His death without God the Father intervening to rescue Him.
In both these scenes of Moses’ life and Mary, Martha, and Lazarus with Jesus it seems to me we get a picture of how near God is to life. But God does not respond to our needs in a timely way we think. Is this perhaps because the present distress is not the whole of life God? We would all love it if God were to swoop down and fix everything at the moment. If God would immediately fix me so I don’t have cancer anymore, or fix the misery of my marriage, or change the hearts of those that are making my life very difficult, how much easier it would be to trust in God.
My personal experience has been that people don’t respond this way when God seems to fix problems. They are apt to think it would have happened even if they had not prayed. God knows this about us. Sometimes God fixes our problems, making things seem to go well for a long span of time. But in the end death comes to us all.
I believe God wanted Moses to learn that God’s idea of the fulfillment of His covenant with His people needs a lot more than one lifetime, or even of many generations to fulfill. There would come a time when Moses would see God was as good as His word. We might see this as pie in the sky thinking. But who can deny that life’s importance reaches far beyond what any of us experience in a moment, or a week, or even a lifetime.
When Jesus let Mary and Martha suffer momentary grief before raising their brother to life—for a while, He wanted them to see a picture bigger than the affection they enjoyed from Him, and He from them. The love of God for His Son, Jesus, in fact, had to still let the great Plan unfold, that sent Jesus to the cross.
But beyond the cross, and beyond your present difficulty, there stretches the loving purpose of God that is only for our good.
The Apostle Paul ends the great Resurrection passage in I Corinthians by writing, “Be steadfast, immoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, for you know that in the Lord your work is not in vain.” So we are to keep on keeping on, whatever the moment is bringing to us.
How often I have been fortified by this truth when things were really tough as a pastor, or when sickness overwhelmed our home. And each of you has your own version of distress to work through. But in your distress, keep on keeping on being faithful, steadfast, immoveable in your commitment to doing the business of life God has given you to do. Those who resort to bitterness, who give up, miss the good that God always seems to steal through the gray clouds for us.
Perhaps as you think of the life of Moses and of Mary and Martha’s disappointment with Jesus at the moment, you may see your life flash before you. Then claim for yourself the good that God holds before all who trust Him, whether their names be Moses, Mary, Martha, or any other name by which we are called.
Let us pray: O Lord, to speak of things beyond our knowledge can seem glib in the face of sorrows. Grant to us the patience to run well the course that is set before us. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:27 AM
January 14, 2007
Two Foundations of Trusting Jesus
Psalm 4 / Joshua 1: 1-8
John 10: 22-42
January 14th, 2007
This morning we ordain and install some of our folk to the sacred work of being deacons and elders. I could scarcely think of three more fitting passages from the Bible to read and ponder at a time like this.
The fourth Psalm is an evening psalm. Read it before you go to sleep at night. Did I honor God with my behavior and my words today? If I got angry, was it fair and reasonable anger or anger because I didn’t get my way? Spend time communing with your own heart on your bed. Take stock of your day. Then get a good sleep at night. Good advice for us all, and all the more so for us if we are in the work of the ministry.
Then we read God’s counsel to Joshua that he was to pass on to the Israelites. They were about to inherit the Promised Land after forty years in the wilderness. He and his people needed a new frame of heart and mind. So the Lord says to Joshua, “Don’t let God’s word depart from your mouth. Let it fill your mind day and night. Then you will prosper in all ways that matter. God will never fail you or forsake you. Live as God has told you to live.”
What better things could be said to us as we begin a new year and as we are on the threshold of a new stage in the life of this congregation. If it isn’t God’s word that fills our thoughts as a guide for our lives it will be other words and ideas that are swirling in our land and in the church. We want to prosper in all the ways that matter. The personal and private lives of those who lead in the church have a lot to do with the success of the congregation. Being a deacon, elder, or pastor asks a lot more of us than attending committee meetings, or going through the motions of church business.
A congregation’s life cannot rise higher than the personal lives of its people. Psalm 4 and Joshua 1 are excellent guides to the inner life of those who lead.
But this morning I want to focus on what Jesus said in our lesson from the Gospel of John. It has to do with a crisis of belief. The religious leaders you and I might think would be first to rally to Jesus didn’t believe He was who He said He was.
But we can’t correct the problems of people who lived two thousand years ago. The reason why John’s Gospel tells us of the crisis of belief of people long ago is because the problem has never gone away. This Gospel was written about sixty years after Jesus left this earthly scene. John showed us this episode in Jesus’ life to inform Christians of his day why Jesus was believable. He then spends much of his effort in the Gospel and three letters near the end of the New Testament answering the question, “so what?” So I say believe in Jesus. So what? What difference does it make? Well, if it has not made a difference in how we live we may fairly ask, “Do we believe in Jesus?”
Today there is a crisis of faith in the Western world—in Europe, in the British Isles, and in America. The crisis is a bit different in America where fish symbols are pasted on the back of a lot of cars, where radio and TV religious broadcasts are part of the culture. In Europe and Great Britain the problem is nearly total indifference to religion. Our crisis is indifference to what faith in Jesus really means.
Is faith in Jesus faith in the American way? Is faith in Jesus a way to prosperity, success, and our idea of the good life? Does faith in Jesus mean mingling with the approved people? Does it mean getting very excited under the fired-up rhetoric of leaders of mass movements? Our crisis is that faith and belief are oft-used terms but the ways of Jesus may not be our ways. Our standard of behavior is not very high. Our standard is some kind of average of what people like us tolerate and do. Jesus said, “You are my friends if you do as I command you.” The Christian faith is more a matter of what we do than what we say we believe. Because I fear we actually may not believe what we say we do.
Belief takes place deep in the heart. It is from our depths that our behavior arises. We show what we really believe by what we do. John’s Gospel tells us, “The one who believes in the Son has eternal life; the one who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God rests upon him.” Belief, if it is not the same thing as obedience to God, requires it in order to be belief.
The setting for the passage from John’s Gospel we have read is the Feast of Dedication, that is Hannukah. Hannukah today takes place about the same time as our Christmas. Jesus walked in a colonnade in the Temple named after King Solomon. We can picture religious teachers gathered around Him, talking as they walked. The place and time of the conversation was significant to it.
About two hundred years earlier the scene here was very different. The Feast of Hannukah brought this to mind. Then the Temple was desecrated by the Greek king of these parts. He tried to stamp out Judaism. In 170 BC this king attacked Jerusalem, killing about 80,000 Jews, selling many others into slavery. Jewish parents who gave their little boys the sign of the Covenant, circumcision, were crucified with their little boys hanging around their necks. Then he had a pig sacrificed on the large altar in the Temple court.
The reason why John tells us when Jesus walked with the religious leaders of His people was because the Jewish revolutionaries who defeated their Greek overlords 200 years before and rededicated the Temple were models of the kind of Messiah they looked for. They wanted someone to topple the Romans as the Maccabees had toppled the Seleucids.
So we read that the leaders asked Jesus, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”
Jesus reply must have puzzled them. “I told you and you don’t believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to who I am. You don’t believe them either.”
How puzzling Jesus must have been when He talked about His sheep knowing and following Him. They didn’t think of the Messiah as a shepherd, unless he was a former shepherd who became a great leader like King David.
People who listened intently to how Jesus taught noticed that He spoke differently from other teachers of His day. When He took the will of God in the laws of Moses to a new level, He did it differently from other religious teachers. Early in the Gospel of Mark we read that some people said of Jesus, “He doesn’t teach like the scribes but as one who has authority.” We wonder how this difference was perceived. Maybe He spoke softly. Maybe He spoke humbly instead of proudly. Maybe His use of folksy illustrations made things more clear than other teachers’ teaching. When He taught they laughed a lot because His illustrations were so funny and profound. He poked fun at self-righeous people who were like someone with a pole sticking out of his eye getting all hot and bothered about someone else with a splinter in his eye. Jesus was not unique in seeing deeper implications to the Ten Commandments’ statements on adultery and murder. Other teachers did too, but they saw implications that put unnecessary burdens on people.
This bothered the religious teachers who seemed to think we can impress God only by living very strict and unnatural lives. For Jesus to disagree with them and then say that He was speaking in behalf of God, whom He called his father, irritated them. They called it blasphemy—cursing God.
Not only that, but He said that the works He did were the works of the Father, of God. They didn’t really quarrel that Jesus healed people and fed great crowds of hungry people. It was that He did it on the Sabbath. That was the problem. Then to say He was doing all this as the works of God, His Father was the final straw. This was an outrage, blasphemy.
Jesus countered their accusation by quoting the 82nd Psalm where the psalmist wrote: “I say you are gods, sons of the most High, all of you.” In our Bibles the word “gods” here is not capitalized because the translators knew that the writer of the psalm referred to judges and not to deities. Judges have the duty to judge according to true justice, the kind that God will give to everyone. In fact, the psalmist calls them “sons of the Most High.”
So when Jesus referred to God as His Father, and said His deeds were the works of the Father, He was in good company. When Jesus referred to God as His father it was in a greater sense than the writer of the 82nd Psalm intended. But at least He could say as the psalmist did of the judges who did the work of God in rendering good justice. Fair justice is God’s justice. As the words of the judges were believable when they were fair, so were Jesus’ words were believable.
Jesus’ words were believable because His works were believable. None of Jesus’ enemies denied that people Jesus healed were really healed. When Jesus fed the multitudes we don’t read that anyone said He was a fake, or that the report was false. The problem Jesus’ enemies had with His deeds, was that He sometimes did them on the Sabbath. This they believed was a violation of the fourth commandment that forbad doing work on the Sabbath. They had not caught on that the Sabbath, the day of rest was made for the benefit of people. God heals and restores the soul of His people as they rest. Jesus did works of restoration more specifically for people He saw in need.
This was all far more than an argument about ideas and rules. Jesus spoke and did all that He did in front of those who followed Him as well as before enemies so they could get the idea that following Him was a matter of doing and saying. At one point Jesus said to His disciples, “If you believe in me you will do greater works than I do because I go to the Father.”
What does that mean? Doesn’t it seem to mean that if we have really believed in Jesus there will be a mysterious grandeur to what we do because we are governed by this One whom we follow? Imagine the effect of great masses of people who believe in Jesus, speaking with His grace, behaving with His gentleness, and finding in themselves a power to do things that defy explanation.
In our day we see those who purport to heal in Jesus name. We see a lot of religious muscle flexed in the cultural wars. There is no doubt of the religious quality of much of this. But instead of persuading people massively to become followers of Jesus, hearts won by the grace and sweetness of the life and Gospel Christians proclaim, there is massive cynicism that Christians have aroused. I had dinner recently with a Purdue professor who was very polite to me and asked good questions about what it was like to be a pastor. But he has been turned away from serious consideration of the Christian message because of the embarrassment of the image of Christianity today. He didn’t say this so as to insult me.
Brothers and sisters, this ought not to be. And I pray that in this place in the coming year, in the coming years, it may not be so. When you come to Jesus listen to all that He says to do in following Him. First of all and completely indispensable let it be indisputably evident that you love one another. Let there be no doubt. Let it be the first piece of evidence when people step foot inside these doors, or when they come to one of our group fellowships, or when they talk with us in private, that we love one another. Without this we have no Gospel worth hearing. This love has characteristics: patient, kind, not jealous, envious, boastful, arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way, not irritable of resentful. It doesn’t rejoice when others do wrong, but in the truth. It hears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things—and does not end.
Then let us speak humbly the great truths that we believe. And let the evidence that we believe the truth not be in the severity and force of our argument, but in the power of our simple obedience to Jesus. Privately live this life. So that when we are together the whole may be greater than the sum of our parts. Then we may see some works proceed from us that have the power of the Holy Spirit behind them.
The horse must come before the cart. First, in the privacy of our homes and in our hearts, love God and love one another. Then do the deeds of love. Then let the mass of those who love God and one another see what will arise as the special works of God that may be credible to those who see them.
I put this challenge before us all this year. But particularly I challenge you who have offered yourselves for service and been chosen by our people, we trust at the prompting of the Holy Spirit, let us live the Gospel we profess. Let our faith, our belief in Jesus, be evident in what we say and in what we do. And God will lead us by His Holy Spirit into the days ahead. They will be good and happy days, full of love and good works and right belief. That awakens faith in Jesus Christ in others.
Let us pray: O Lord God, how grand is your gift to us of being called your children. Help us to follow Your Holy Child Jesus in all that we think, and say, and do. And grant that this congregation may experience your love that passes all understanding, and display it. And that through us others may come to believe Jesus and to follow Him. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 02:01 PM