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Discovering God: Continual Presence John 16: 1 – 33 Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 13 Apr, 2008 |
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WE ARE talking about Knowing God. In this context, we need to combine the resurrection of Jesus and the work of the Spirit. The risen Jesus communicates God to us by his Holy Spirit. |
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God desires, God planned from the beginning, to have fellowship with us. He created us for fellowship, and we humans threw that chance away. Yet God treated us gently. He was gracious to us despite our rebelliousness. Even though we presume on that graciousness, he still loves us and longs for us to change. You know there is no other way for God to restore that broken fellowship, save through the death of Jesus our Lord. Today, let’s see how the resurrection of Jesus and the coming of the Holy Spirit restore communion between God and his creatures. God’s delight is fellowship with us. He wants us to be aligned with his will. Jesus taught us to pray the way God the Father delights to hear us pray: Our Father who art in heaven, This is a prayer for people who are in God’s family by faith. This is a prayer for people who acknowledge God’s majesty and sovereignty. This is a prayer for people who make themselves available to establish God’s will on earth through the influence of obedient and dedicated lives. It is a Kingdom prayer. God wants to acknowledge such people as his own children. And children need a family where parents communicate with them. Through the resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit, God continues the communication he began at the creation. He wants to hear from us; he wants us to listen to him. When our grandson, James, was about three, Chris and I took him to the Flemington Markets and the Grand Opening of a new toy shop in Annandale. He was fine at the markets. He enjoyed looking at things. He told us what we should buy for Daddy and Mummy. Daddy would love mangoes, he told us; and Mummy would love broccoli. So he helped us look for those things and buy them. At the toy shop it was a bit different. He loved Thomas the Tank Engine. And there was a great Thomas railway track set up in the shop for the children to play with. It was complete with all kinds of trains and carriages. He was like a pig in mud! But when it was time to go, he just didn‘t want to hear us. He was doing his own thing; he was enjoying it, and he didn’t want to be diverted from his fun. We were not very impressed, of course. You can’t let a three year old determine the priorities of your day! Yet how often do we treat our heavenly Father in the same way? He speaks to us, and, in effect, we say, “Go away, God — I’m busy. I am playing, and I don’t want your reality to intrude!” Yet God sees the real world much more clearly than you or I do. He sees what our real roles should be in our situation. He wants to communicate that vision to us so that your life and mine will run as they were created to run. Imagine how sad he must feel to know that we couldn’t care less about that plan! And understand how his heart is warmed when you and I choose to hear his voice and to follow his commands.
RESURRECTION One key to God’s communication with us is the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Don’t just understand the fact of the resurrection. We also need to know its meaning. Jesus spoke so often of his suffering and resurrection, that there are many passages much clearer about it than the one we read, but we know what he is saying, even when we read, JN 16:19 Jesus saw that they wanted to ask him about this, so he said to them, “Are you asking one another what I meant when I said, ‘In a little while you will see me no more, and then after a little while you will see me’? 20 I tell you the truth, you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy. When I first read passages like that one, I thought, “The gospels were written after the crucifixion. Obviously the writers put these words into Jesus’ mouth. He may or may not have risen from the dead, but you can’t prove anything from what they say Jesus taught his disciples on the subject.” That makes sense, but it is wrong. First, as any historian would say, we can’t reject evidence, just because we think it is unlikely to be true. You need to be sure it is untrue before you reject it. Once, no one took the ancient Greek legends of Jason and the Argonauts seriously; recently they have found more and more evidence of an underlying historical basis. When it comes to Jesus’ words about resurrection, we have much more to go on. In Mark 10, we read, Again he took the Twelve aside and told them what was going to happen to him. 33 “We are going up to Jerusalem,” he said, “and the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will hand him over to the Gentiles, 34 who will mock him and spit on him, flog him and kill him. Three days later he will rise.” In John’s gospel, Jesus tells the Pharisees that, if the building of the temple is torn down, he will rebuild it in three days — at least, that is what the Jewish people understood that he was saying. But many realised that he was actually speaking of his own body and his death and resurrection. At the end of Mark’s gospel, we hear the case made against Jesus, alleging that he was, in effect, guilty of witchcraft. The testimony is that he was going to tear down the temple and rebuild it in three days. But we read that the witnesses couldn’t agree on what Jesus really said, and their testimony was dismissed. Put the two together and you have some evidence that Jesus actually did predict his resurrection. Then, when you look at some of his other sayings about his resurrection, Biblical critics have attempted to translate these sayings back into the Aramaic that Jesus would have used. When they do that, they get an interesting result. Most of these sayings are actually written in the same poetic verse form as the Psalms used. The gospel writers themselves do not use that verse form; it is only there in many of Jesus’ teachings. This is important, because that was how teachers taught in those days. We all learn better when we hear it in verse than when it is just plain prose. It is clear that Jesus actually said these things, and said them in a way that people would remember. Jesus promised to rise again! But the fact of the resurrection, the fact of the empty tomb, the fact of the inability of the authorities to find the body, the fact of the sudden boldness of the disciples, all say something, all have meaning. We know Jesus returned to life, but, so what? There are a lot of so whats. The cross is vindicated by the resurrection. If Jesus rose, then we know that his death was really different from any other death, that God had somehow intervened for our good. The resurrection gives hope. Our hope is never in some kind of survival of the soul beyond death: our hope is in sharing the resurrection of our Lord! The resurrection gives life: if death is no longer the ultimate victor, it need no longer dominate you and me, either! But there is still something else which we really have to consider, and that it that the resurrection gives us an ever–living Saviour, who is alive to communicate with us, his people. He is our head, and we must hear from him! That’s why the Quaker leader, George Fox, so often told his hearers, “Sit down under Christ, your Teacher, and learn from him!” He knew that those who want to hear from Jesus will hear from him.
THE HOLY SPIRIT But that raises another question: how does he communicate with us? And the general answer is, “By the Holy Spirit.” Jesus told his disciples, JN 16:12 “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. 13 But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. 14 He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you. 15 All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you. Repeatedly, Jesus tells the disciples about the coming of the Spirit. It is very strong in John’s Gospel. From Chapter 12 through to Chapter 16 , the Spirit appears over and over. Jesus speaks of him as the one whom he will send, or the one sent by the Father; he says that the Spirit will teach the things that the disciples still need to learn from Jesus, he says that the Spirit will take what belongs to himself and make it known to the disciples. He also says that everything that belongs to the Father is his own as well. In other words, he declares the triune nature of God, that the Father and the Son are equal, because they share everything, and the Holy Spirit is equivalent to the Father and the Son because everything that belongs to Jesus is available to the Spirit, too. Elsewhere, Jesus calls the Spirit “Another Comforter.” The Greek is interesting, because it uses one of two Greek words for other. In Greek, you could say, heteros or allos, both meaning “other”. Here’s how it works. If someone offers you lamb cutlets, but you really wanted the lamb shanks, you would say, “Can I have another choice?” The word is heteros, another of a different kind. If you had just eaten a turkish delight, and you didn’t think you had had enough, you would say, “Can I have allos — another one of the same?” Jesus calls the Holy Spirit, “Allos Paraklitos — another Comforter of the same kind.” He says, “You have seen the way I work. Well, when the Holy Spirit comes, he will be like me in the way he works.” And that is how the Holy Spirit is. He takes what Jesus has and applies it to us. In John 15, Jesus says, I am the vine, you are the branches... He uses an image from farming. He builds an extended metaphor, a kind of illustration, where he is the strong, healthy, life–giving vine stock, and we are branches grafted into that vine. God the Father is the gardener who looks for fruit on each branch and discards those that bear no fruit. And, by the same metaphor, the Holy Spirit is the life of the vinestock, the sap from the main root, coursing through the branches, giving them life, and producing fruit in its season. I’ve told the story before, of the Canadian Quaker who had a strong impression that he should go to a certain remote logging camp to preach the Gospel to the workers. When he got there, the camp was empty, but he prayed and still felt the sense that he should preach, so he did —preached in an empty dining hut — and then he returned home. Years later, while the Quaker was visiting London, a stranger approached him. “Sir,” he said, “You look familiar to me. Did you preach many years ago in a logging camp in the Canadian wilderness, when there was no one there?” The Quaker said he had. The stranger told his story, how they had moved on to a new site that morning, but he and a friend had returned to pick up some equipment and listened outside the window. What they heard spoke to their hearts, and they went back to their new camp, began reading a Bible one of them owned, and, gradually, many of the men became Christians, and this stranger finally gave up logging and trained as a pastor. When we listen for the Sprirt’s voice, he will speak to us. At our Theological College retreat once, the leader urged us to take our Bibles and let God show us what he wanted to say to us. God directed me to a passage I didn’t know well, in the end of Jeremiah. It meant nothing to me at first, but the passage came back to me, three times in the course of 20 minutes or so. I prayed about it. Then it hit me, like a slap with a dead fish: Our Denomination was going through one ot its worst periods ever. The leaders were taking a cowardly path. And God was giving me a word to those leaders. I didn’t want to know it. I was sick with fear, The word told our leaders that they were headed in the wrong direction, that we would all suffer if they didn’t change tack. Until this week, I have felt bad about what I did. At the Baptist Assembly a few weeks later, I spoke about our wrong directions, but I didn’t insist that the word came from God, and no one paid much attention. But I only just realised that a key leader in our denomination was visiting the Retreat at the time, and he heard it all as it came to me. I did speak the 'Thus saith the Lord!” where it had to be spoken. But the Holy Spirit speaks if we want to hear, and he will lead us into all truth, because he speaks for a living Christ and makes known to us the whole counsel of God — even the bewildering parts, and even the truths we would rather not know about.
CONCLUSION God really wants to take us into his confidence. He doesn’t want us to be soldiers on parade, taking orders from some sergeant who reads the dispatches each morning and passes the important parts on. He wants us to be his friends. He wants us to sit around the table with him. He wants us to share in the discussion about how we will carry out his plans. He wants us to work with him in our lives, in our marriages or families, in our communities in our nation and in our world. Jesus breathed on his disciples and said, Receive the Holy Spirit. That command is still valid today. As we pray, let’s reconfirm our reception of the Spirit of the Risen Christ AMEN |
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© Peter R. Green 2007. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.) |
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