Encountering Jesus - In Church [6] - Neil Ryan
August 10th, 2008 by sound
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I never thought I’d live to see the day but my parents have just bought a 42” Bravia LCD Full Hd TV
I remember years ago when they bought a new TV my Mum was so embarrassed she used to put a table cloth over it while they weren’t watching it, so that if anybody came in they wouldn’t see this opulent thing in their lounge room!!
Now they have gone whole hog!
If any of you are in the process of doing the same you are probably close to a nervous breakdown trying to understand all the jargon.
Years ago all you had to decide was whether to have a big TV or a small TV.
I looked up a web site for help the other day and this is what it said….
Now there are different HDTV broadcast standards, different type of video / audio inputs, different TV technologies …. LCD, DLP, PLASMA, CRT, SXRD, SED, FED, OLED …!
HD or Full HD
Why settle for High Definition when you can have Full High Definition!
One thing I know.
I have an old analogue 68cm Phillips TV and it gives me an image of someone on the screen but when I look at my brother’s 127 cm Full HDTV
I feel like they are in the room with me!!!
I hope we will see something like that this morning.
We want to see Jesus in Full HD
I hope he will be more than an image on the page of our Bibles and we will see him and know him right here amongst us today!
We pick up the story about the time when Jesus is in hot water. He has been around long enough now, done enough and said enough to be causing a massive stir among religious establishment.
This is a time when people are wondering all over the land just who Jesus really is.
Read v2-5
Even his brothers are getting edgy.
They kind of give him an ultimatum.
“You keep talking…. Its time for action!”
If you think you are the Messiah then go and act like one.
Put yourself out there
Be seen in the right places
Messiah’s don’t hang around in Galilee!!
v5…..
You can be around Jesus and not know who he is
You can grow up in Church and not really know Jesus – or certainly have a distorted view of Jesus.
John is building his case that Jesus is none other than the Son of God. He demands our response!
John never portrays Jesus as just some kind of subjective spiritual guru – a kind of ancient mix between Gandhi and the Dalai Lama.
He portrays him as God and today he comes out in full HD and stands strong against the most intimidating and powerful people in the land!!
Read v10-13
Jesus goes up quietly to Jerusalem – incognito.
There are opinions swirling all around about him.
Some said he was a good man and others said he was a deceiver!
It still remains the most critical question for everyone of us.
Who is Jesus?
Who do you say he is?
Jesus is rarely ever seen in terms of strength.
We stand in awe of a Nelson Mandela who is elected Prime Minister of South Africa after spending 27 years in prison under an Apartheid Regime.
We see pictures of a bare chested Vladimir Putin holding a AK47 rifle and he looks every bit the President of Russia
But when we think of Jesus we think of a tea sipping man in a gown sitting by the lake talking to little children.
He is seen in such subjective terms.
His spirituality seems to leave people with little sense of his reality and so it makes it so much easier to turn Jesus into whatever mythological person you need him to be.
So he becomes the champion of
· social reform
· political aggression
· conservative doctrine and liberal doctrine all at the same time!
Jesus has become the flag bearer for every imaginable cause known to man.
People seem to find it hard to take Jesus seriously when it comes to leadership but even more dangerous to see him as just a good man!
The Koran teaches that Jesus was a good man
You may not know that Islam believes Jesus was a good man, a prophet, did miracles and born of virgin!
But for Islam Jesus is not the son of Allah –
He is not divine
He is not Savior who has come into the world to save us from our sin!
We have been lulled into thinking that this is just a point of order among theologians – but it is the foundation stone of Christian faith.
Jesus is not just a good man
Jesus is not some subjective spiritual entity to whom we tip our hat or give our nod of approval.
John says right up front
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God from the beginning….The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us and we beheld his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the father, full of grace and truth… [John 1:1-2;14]
Read v14-24
Here’s where it starts to get messy.
We see Jesus coming into clearer definition.
At the moment we will only see Him in HD!
He comes into the temple and starts to teach and it throws the people into some kind of frenzy!
….how did this man get such learning without having studied.
Where does his authority come from?
This is Jesus at his controversial best!
The Rabbi went to Rabbinical school to be educated in all the finer points of the Law. They knew every jot and tittles!
But the people knew their words and speeches were cold and lifeless and full of judgment and prohibition!
The problem was that every time Jesus spoke, his words seem to be filled with life and reality and grace and truth!
Jesus says, ‘your authority is all boxed in by what you know and have learned from others, where you got your qualifications….my authority comes from God who sent me’
You could have cut the air with a knife at that stage!
Tantamount to heresy and blasphemy!
Jesus knew that at heart we think that the ultimate source of authority is our REASON!
If something doesn’t meet the standards of our critical analysis then we think we can dismiss it as a relic of the past.
Sometimes we have all the right learning and along comes someone with the experience …..
‘That’s not the way it works…..Go and mature in knowledge and then you can experience God!
That is spiritual snobbery and that’s what we have here!
Jesus turns it all around and says
When you experience God you will know that what I am saying is true!
Read v17
For too long the Church has thought that knowledge is synonymous with truth.
It’s disturbing when our knowledge seems lifeless and along comes somebody who is experiencing the very thing we can only talk about!!!
Jesus is un-nerving the people in the Church.
They thought all their theology was pretty much sewn up and Jesus is unraveling it.
I often wonder what would happen if Jesus came to our Church.
How unnerving would it be?
Would he move around the Hall out the back and as he talked with us and looked around, say
“…you know, this is just how I imagined it would all be”
Or would he ask some squirmy questions, would he put us on the spot, would he shake up our theology, would he leave us feeling perturbed instead of warm and fuzzy. Would we find out that in fact he makes Nelson Mandella look like a squash when it comes to leadership!!
We have just gone through a time when doctrine has been relegated and experience has become the all important thing.
That’s not where John would have us end up.
He is writing a gospel for one purpose and that is to remind us that truth and experience must end up with Jesus Christ.
It must lead us to know him, to worship him, to follow him to share him with a world that knows nothing of him!
The crowd respond in v20
You’re crazy!
Jesus says,
I do one miracle and this is how you react.
Can’t you see how hard you’ve become!
You have laws about the Sabbath but you still find a way to circumcise a male child on the Sabbath – you see nothing wrong with that
[Law required male circumcised 8 days old]
Yet when I heal a man on the Sabbath – when I bring life to a man on the Sabbath you want to kill me.
Don’t judge me so superficially! [v24]
Jesus is shaking up the Church.
They had not confronted their own hypocricy.
They had not challenged their own inconsistency.
I believe if Jesus came to our Church next Sunday he would do the same thing!
This is a day when we want packaged Christiantiy.
We just want the big idea.
We don’t want all the complexities and mysteries…
We don’t want to have to labour over the hard things…
Don’t complicate it, just give it to me simply so I can get the most out of it by putting the least into it!
Where did we ever get the idea that faith was not complex.
Peter wrote in 2 Peter 3:16 ….of Paul….his letters contain some things hard to understand
Jesus challenges their presuppositions, their lazy convictions and their untested faith!
v25 ….. people become restless.
They’re all confused.
Is he, or isn’t he?
What are the authorities saying?
Where’s he from again?
The Messiah was supposed to come from Bethlehem, this bloke is from Galilee!
Jesus puts it right out there.
You know me but you don’t know me!
I am from my father who sent me [v29]
They knew exactly what he was claiming because they tried to seize him and only now does Jesus come out in full HD
Read v37-38
This is no mere co-incidence of timing.
Feast of Tabernacles or Booths was a festival where the Jews remembered their time in the Wilderness where they dwelled in tents or makeshift housing.
They would build small houses of branches and live in them for a week.
A Priest would leave the temple at dawn with a procession of people. They would go through the Water gate to the Pool of Siloam.
There he would take a golden pitcher and fill it from the pool while the people sang Isaiah 12. They would return to the temple where trumpets would sound three times. The priest would walk around the altar while the people sang the Hallel Psalms (113-118).
He would then go up a ramp at the side of the altar, raise the pitcher and pour out the water into a funnel next to the altar. As the water fell to the ground another priest would pour out wine on the opposite side of the altar.
As the water flows out of the Temple Jesus stands up in full HD and announces,
If anyone is thirsty let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me as the Scripture says, streams of living water will flow within him [v37-38]
Isn’t that interesting?
What did God provide in the wilderness?
Bread and water!
In John 6 – Bread
In John 7 – Water
If it’s life you’re looking for I’m the one!!!
You know in the Baptist scene – faith is almost exclusively tied to our understanding of truth.
We have no liturgy, no visuals in the Church [The reformation did away with all them!]
But for the Jews their whole faith was surrounded by visual reminders of what they believed.
When they saw the water flowing down the steps of the temple they would have thought of the words from
Ezekiel 47:1ff
What a picture
Jesus says I am that water
You want life – wade out beyond your ankles, wade out beyond knee deep, wade out beyond waste – in fact I am a mighty river that you cannot plumb the depths of!!
Why do you want to stay with a heart that resembles a desert?
A few years ago, a priest named Henri Nouwen went through a mid-life crisis. During the crisis he prayed, “Lord, show me where you want me to go and I will follow you.” He felt like God said, “Go and live among the poor in spirit, and they will heal you.”
To make a long story short, Henri Nouwen left a professorship at HarvardUniversity where he taught some of the best and brightest minds in the world to work with the mentally handicapped at the Daybreak Community in Toronto, Canada.
Nouwen said that he thought getting older and more mature meant “more and more control.” He found that the exact opposite is true! He said, “When I entered the community with mentally handicapped people all controls fell apart, and I came to realize that every day was full of surprises--often surprises I was least prepared for.” When someone disagreed with what Henri Nouwen said, they didn’t wait until he was done speaking. They just interrupted him. It didn’t matter that he had written books. None of them could read. It didn’t matter that he’d taught at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard. None of them had been to college.
Nouwen says, “Without realizing it, the people I came to live with made me aware of the extent to which my leadership was still a desire to control. It took me a long time to feel safe in this unpredictable climate, and I still have moments in which I want to clamp down and tell everyone to shut up, get in line, listen to me, and believe in what I say. But I am also getting in touch with the mystery that leadership means to be led.”
That only comes when we know Jesus.
Not the Jesus of convenience,
Not the Jesus of knowledge,
Not the Jesus of tradition
But Jesus who says
If anyone is thirsty let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.
PRAY