Latest / truthunedited / Fall Asleep to The Gospel of John EXPLAINED _ The Gospel That Begins Before the World

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Fall Asleep to The Gospel of John EXPLAINED _ The Gospel That Begins Before the World · truthunedited

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Speaker 1: Something unusual happened. When the Fourth Gospel was written. Three
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Speaker 1: others had come before it, Matthew Mark Luke. Each told
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Speaker 1: the story of Jesus carefully, faithfully from what had been
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Speaker 1: seen or gathered or passed down through the communities that
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Speaker 1: preserved it. Each began in a recognizable place, a genealogy,
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Speaker 1: a desert, a historian's careful introduction to his sources. The
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Speaker 1: Fourth Gospel begins somewhere else, entirely. It begins before the
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Speaker 1: world existed. Ancient Christian tradition reaching back to the second
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Speaker 1: century identifies the author as John, the youngest of the disciples,
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Speaker 1: the one the gospel itself calls only this the disciple
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Speaker 1: whom Jesus loved. He never uses his own name, not
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Speaker 1: once across twenty one chapters. What he gives instead is testimony,
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Speaker 1: the testimony of someone who was very close to everything
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Speaker 1: this gospel describes, passed across every century between that moment
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Speaker 1: and this quiet room, this particular night, tonight, we are
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Speaker 1: going to read what he wrote, all of it slowly,
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Speaker 1: not as information to be processed or doctrine to be evaluated,
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Speaker 1: as a letter that has been traveling toward this night
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Speaker 1: for two thousand years. You do not need to bring
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Speaker 1: anything with you, no background, no prior reading, no certainty
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Speaker 1: about what you believe or whether you believe anything at all.
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Speaker 1: You only need to be here, breathing, willing to listen,
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Speaker 1: Let the day go. It will be there in the
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Speaker 1: morning to night. Belongs to something else. Chapter one. The
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Speaker 1: word that was already there before the first line of
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Speaker 1: this gospel. We need to stop and notice something easy
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Speaker 1: to miss. Every story has a beginning, and the beginning
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Speaker 1: a writer chooses tells you everything about the kind of
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Speaker 1: story they are trying to tell. Matthew begins with a
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Speaker 1: genealogy forty two generations from Abraham to Jesus. He is
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Speaker 1: writing for a Jewish audience and wants them to know immediately,
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Speaker 1: this man is the fulfillment of everything your history has
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Speaker 1: been moving toward. Mark begins with a man walking out
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Speaker 1: of the desert. No birth, no childhood, just a voice
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Speaker 1: in the wilderness, and then a man, and then everything
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Speaker 1: happening very fast. Mark uses the word immediately forty one times.
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Speaker 1: He is writing a story with urgency. Luke begins with
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Speaker 1: an introduction to a patron named Theophilus and a careful
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Speaker 1: account of sources gathered and verified. He is writing the
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Speaker 1: way a thoughtful historian writes, deliberately with evidence. And then
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Speaker 1: there is this gospel. This gospel begins before the world began.
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Speaker 1: In the beginning was the Word, and the word was
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Speaker 1: with God, and the word was God. If you have
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Speaker 1: heard those words before, I want to ask you to
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Speaker 1: hear them again tonight, as if for the first time,
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Speaker 1: because the writer is doing something in those three sentences
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Speaker 1: that would have stopped his first reader's cold, something that
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Speaker 1: was not subtle, something that was in the world of
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Speaker 1: the first century, either the most profound claim anyone had
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Speaker 1: ever committed to writing, or an act of breathtaking theological courage.
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Speaker 1: He is rewriting the first line of the Bible. Genesis
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Speaker 1: begins in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
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Speaker 1: This gospel begins in the beginning, was the Word. He
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Speaker 1: is taking you back before Genesis, before creation, before light
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Speaker 1: and darkness and water and land, and he is telling
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Speaker 1: you that something was already there. The Word was already there.
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Speaker 1: In Greek, the language this gospel was written in, the
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Speaker 1: word you used is logos, and logos carries far more
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Speaker 1: weight than its English translation suggests. In Greek philosophy, logos
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Speaker 1: was not simply a word spoken aloud. It was the
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Speaker 1: rational principle underlying all of reality, the reason behind the
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Speaker 1: order of things. The logic woven into the structure of
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Speaker 1: the universe itself. The Stoic philosophers widely read throughout the
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Speaker 1: Roman world of the first century, taught that Logos was
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Speaker 1: the divine reason holding everything together, the reason the stars
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Speaker 1: moved in their patterns, the reason seasons changed, the reason
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Speaker 1: the world was coherent rather than chaotic. Logos was, in
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Speaker 1: their understanding, the mind of the universe made visible in
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Speaker 1: its order. When the first Greek speaking readers encountered the
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Speaker 1: opening sentence of this gospel, they recognized the word immediately logs,
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Speaker 1: the rational foundation of all that exists. And then the
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Speaker 1: writer said something that was have made them read the
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Speaker 1: sentence again. The logos was with God, and the Logos
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Speaker 1: was God. And then eleven verses later, the word became
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Speaker 1: flesh and dwelt among us, the rational foundation of the
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Speaker 1: entire universe. This gospel is claiming from its very first page,
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Speaker 1: became a human being and lived in a specific place
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Speaker 1: at a specific time, among specific people, sit with the
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Speaker 1: strangeness of that for a moment. The ancient Greek world
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Speaker 1: had gods, many of them, but those gods did not
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Speaker 1: become human that was beneath them. The material world was
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Speaker 1: considered less real than the spiritual world. The idea that
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Speaker 1: the logos itself would take on human flesh and live
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Speaker 1: among ordinary people in an occupied province of the Roman Empire,
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Speaker 1: eating bread and walking dusty roads and attending weddings was
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Speaker 1: not simply unusual. It was philosophically scandalous, and to the
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Speaker 1: Jewish world it carried a difference wait entirely because Jewish
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Speaker 1: readers knew exactly what in the beginning meant. They had
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Speaker 1: heard those words every time the Torah was read aloud
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Speaker 1: in the synagogue. In the beginning, God created, and now
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Speaker 1: this Gospel was beginning there too, and saying that the
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Speaker 1: Word was already present in that beginning. In Hebrew, the
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Speaker 1: word God spoke to bring light into existence was not
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Speaker 1: merely sound. It was creative power. When God spoke, things
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Speaker 1: came into being that had not existed before. The Word
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Speaker 1: of God in the Hebrew tradition was not passive. It
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Speaker 1: accomplished things. It changed reality. The writer is telling both
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Speaker 1: audiences at once, the Greek world and the Jewish world.
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Speaker 1: The logos your philosophers have been describing the divine reason
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Speaker 1: behind all things is the same as the word that
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Speaker 1: spoke creation into existence in Genesis, and that word has
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Speaker 1: now become a person. He was in the beginning with God.
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Speaker 1: All things were made through him. Without him, nothing was
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Speaker 1: made that has been made. Think about what this gospel
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Speaker 1: is claiming before it has introduced a single scene or character.
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Speaker 1: It is saying that every sunset you have ever watched
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Speaker 1: was made through this person, every mountain, every ocean, every
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Speaker 1: human face. The entire physical universe, with its capacity to
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Speaker 1: produce life and beauty and meaning, was made through the
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Speaker 1: one this gospel is about to tell you about. And
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Speaker 1: then it says this in him was life, and the
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Speaker 1: life was the light of men. The light shines in
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Speaker 1: the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. Breathe
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Speaker 1: that in slowly light and darkness. The writer introduces this
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Speaker 1: pair of images in the fifth and sixth verses, and
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Speaker 1: he will not put them down for twenty one chapters.
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Speaker 1: They will run through the entire story like two threads
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Speaker 1: woven through the same cloth, always present, always in ten,
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Speaker 1: always resolving in the same direction. Light shines, darkness does
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Speaker 1: not overcome it. Now something important about when these words
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Speaker 1: were written. Most scholars who have studied the language, theology,
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Speaker 1: and historical references of this gospel place its composition in
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Speaker 1: the final decades of the first century. The writer was
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Speaker 1: an old man by then, and the world he was
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Speaker 1: writing from was very different from the world in which
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Speaker 1: the events of his gospel had taken place. Jerusalem had
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Speaker 1: been destroyed in the year seventy of the first century
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Speaker 1: after a Jewish revolt against Roman rule. The Roman general
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Speaker 1: Titus besieged the city. The Temple, the center of Jewish
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Speaker 1: worship and identity for a thousand years, was burned to
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Speaker 1: the ground. The historian Josephus, who was present during the siege,
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Speaker 1: recorded catastrophic loss of life. The city this gospel describes,
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Speaker 1: with its pools and its porticos and its crowded feast days,
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Speaker 1: was rubble. Most of the people who had walked with
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Speaker 1: Jesus were gone. This is the darkness the writer knew
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Speaker 1: first hand when he set down the words. The light
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Speaker 1: shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
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Speaker 1: He was not writing abstract theology. He was writing testimony.
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Speaker 1: He had watched darkness do its worst, and he wrote,
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Speaker 1: the darkness has not overcome it. The word overcome in
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Speaker 1: Greek is catalabin. It carries two meanings at once, to
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Speaker 1: extinguish or overpower, and also to comprehend or seize. Many
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Speaker 1: scholars believe both meanings are intentional. Here, the darkness could
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Speaker 1: not extinguish the light, and the darkness could not comprehend
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Speaker 1: it either. Both remain true. To Night. There is a
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Speaker 1: woman named Anna. She is forty two years old and
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Speaker 1: she lives outside of Portland, Oregon. She grew up in
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Speaker 1: a church, but left it in her early thirties, not
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Speaker 1: in anger, but gradually, the way a person leaves something
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Speaker 1: when the reasons for staying become quieter than the reasons
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Speaker 1: for going. She never stopped believing entirely. She stopped believing
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Speaker 1: that the version she had been given was the whole story.
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Speaker 1: To Night. She is lying in bed with the lamp
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Speaker 1: still on. She has been trying to read for an
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Speaker 1: hour and has not absorbed a single page. She put
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Speaker 1: on this video because something in the title caught her attention,
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Speaker 1: and because it is late, and because she is tired
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Speaker 1: in the way that sleep alone does not fix. She
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Speaker 1: does not know yet that the offer at the beginning
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Speaker 1: of this Gospel, not of blood nor of human will,
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Speaker 1: but of God, was written directly into the exhaustion she
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Speaker 1: is carrying tonight. Now the Gospel introduces someone not Jesus
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Speaker 1: yet first a man named John, a different John, John
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Speaker 1: the Baptist. There was a man sent from God whose
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Speaker 1: name was John. He came as a witness to bear
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Speaker 1: witness about the Light, that all might believe through him.
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Speaker 1: He was not the Light, but came to bear witness
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Speaker 1: about the Light. This moment breaks the cosmic register deliberately.
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Speaker 1: We were in the beginning before creation, in the realm
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Speaker 1: of logos and light and life, and then suddenly there
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Speaker 1: is a specific man with a specific name, sent with
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Speaker 1: a specific mission. The writer is anchoring the cosmic in
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Speaker 1: the historical. The logos is not an idea. The logos
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Speaker 1: entered a specific world, a world where a specific man
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Speaker 1: was walking by the Jordan River, telling any one who
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Speaker 1: would listen that something was coming. And then the prolog
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Speaker 1: makes what might be its most devastating observation. He was
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Speaker 1: in the world, and the world was made through him,
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Speaker 1: Yet the world did not know him. He came to
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Speaker 1: his own and his own people did not receive him.
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Speaker 1: The one through whom everything was made entered his own creation,
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Speaker 1: and his creation did not recognize him. Hear how the
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Speaker 1: writer tells that story without drama, without accusation, with something
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Speaker 1: that sounds honestly like grief. He was in the world,
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Speaker 1: The world was made through him. The world did not
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Speaker 1: know him. But then, but to all who did receive him,
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Speaker 1: who believed in his name, he gave the right to
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Speaker 1: become children of God, who were born not of blood,
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Speaker 1: nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the
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Speaker 1: will of man, but of God. Not of blood, not
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Speaker 1: of ancestry or heritage, or birth into the right family,
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Speaker 1: not of human effort or achievement, not of any human
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Speaker 1: institution or authority, but of God. This is the offer
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Speaker 1: placed at the very beginning, before a single story has
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Speaker 1: been told, Before the wedding at Cana, or the conversation
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Speaker 1: at the well, or the man born blind, or the
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Speaker 1: raising of Lazarus, Before the cross and the empty tomb,
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Speaker 1: and the breakfast on the beach, Before all of it,
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Speaker 1: the writer tells you what all it is for the
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Speaker 1: right to become children of God, given freely to those
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Speaker 1: who receive. Anna has put down the book she was
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Speaker 1: not reading. She is listening now. Something in that sentence
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Speaker 1: caught her, the idea of belonging that does not depend
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Speaker 1: on getting something right first. And she is turning it
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Speaker 1: slowly in the dark, the way you turn a smooth
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Speaker 1: stone in your hand, feeling its weight, without forcing it
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Speaker 1: into a conclusion. And then the prolog reaches its center
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Speaker 1: of gravity, the sentence that everything before it has been
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Speaker 1: building toward, and that everything after it will spend twenty
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Speaker 1: one chapters unpacking. And the word became flesh and dwelt
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Speaker 1: among us. And we have seen his glory, glory as
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Speaker 1: of the only son from the Father, full of grace
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Speaker 1: and truth. The word became flesh. In Greek, the word
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Speaker 1: for flesh is sarks. It means physical material human existence,
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Speaker 1: the kind that gets hungry and tired and dusty, the
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Speaker 1: kind that feels pain, the kind that dies. The writer
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Speaker 1: is not being poetic. He is being shockingly specific. The
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Speaker 1: logos took on a physical human body and lived among us,
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Speaker 1: dwelt among us. The Greek word is eskinocen. It means
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Speaker 1: to pitch a tent, to set up camp. The writer
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Speaker 1: is using the same language the Old Testament uses for
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Speaker 1: the tabernacle the tent where God's presence dwelled among Israel.
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Speaker 1: In the wilderness. God is pitching his tent among us again,
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Speaker 1: but this time the tent is human flesh, and we
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Speaker 1: have seen his glory. The writer keeps saying, we, not I,
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Speaker 1: not they, We the testimony of people who were there,
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Speaker 1: who are handing it to you now, because what they
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Speaker 1: witnessed was too important to keep to themselves. Full of
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Speaker 1: grace and truth. In Greek, grace is charis, and what
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Speaker 1: follows is even more striking from his fullness. We have
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Speaker 1: all received grace upon grace. In Greek char are in
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Speaker 1: anti charitos, grace replacing grace, one wave of grace followed
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Speaker 1: by another without end. And then eighteen verses in the
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Speaker 1: name is finally given, For the law was given through Moses.
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Speaker 1: Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. There it is
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Speaker 1: the name. The entire prolog has been building toward Jesus Christ.
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Speaker 1: The law came through Moses. It was real, it was holy,
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Speaker 1: It pointed toward life without being able to give it.
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Speaker 1: Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ, not described, not
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Speaker 1: pointed toward Kem arrived in a specific person, in a
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Speaker 1: specific body, in a specific place, And the prolog closes
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Speaker 1: with the most intimate claim of all. No one has
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Speaker 1: ever seen God, the only God who is at the
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Speaker 1: Father's side. He has made him known. No one has
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Speaker 1: ever seen God. Every prophet, every mystic, every person who
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Speaker 1: looked up at the night sky and felt something immense
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Speaker 1: and true and could not name it. Every human being
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Speaker 1: who ever lived and wondered if there was something behind
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Speaker 1: the universe that was not indifferent, reached towards something they
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Speaker 1: could not fully see. No one has ever seen God.
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Speaker 1: But the Word became flesh, and the Word made him known.
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Speaker 1: The Greek word in that final sentence is exegisato, from
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Speaker 1: the same root as exegesis, the careful explanation and unpacking
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Speaker 1: of a text. The Word is the living explanation of God,
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Speaker 1: the embodied interpretation of a God whom no human eye
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Speaker 1: has ever fully seen. That is what you are about
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Speaker 1: to hear, story by story, face by face, one chapter
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Speaker 1: at a time, the explanation of God told through a
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Speaker 1: gospel that begins not with a birth or a genealogy
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Speaker 1: or a voice in the wilderness, but with something that
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Speaker 1: was already there before the world was made. Let what
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Speaker 1: you have heard settle in you, the way Anna is
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Speaker 1: letting it settle in her right now, without urgency, without effort,
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Speaker 1: turning it slowly in the dark. We have not yet
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Speaker 1: reached the first story. The water that becomes wine, and
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Speaker 1: the woman at the well and the man born blind
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Speaker 1: and the voice outside the tomb are still ahead. But
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Speaker 1: you have heard the foundation, the thing beneath all the
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Speaker 1: stories that makes the stories mean what they mean. The
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Speaker 1: light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not
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Speaker 1: overcome it. Chapter two, Water into Wine and what it
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Speaker 1: actually means. A wedding is happening in a small village
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Speaker 1: in Galilee. The village is called Cana. It does not
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Speaker 1: appear in any Roman record. It does not sit on
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Speaker 1: any major trade route. It is the kind of place
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Speaker 1: that exists everywhere in every century, a small collection of
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Speaker 1: houses and families and daily routines, known only to the
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Speaker 1: people who live there and the people who love them.
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Speaker 1: Someone is getting married. We do not know their names.
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Speaker 1: The gospel does not tell us. What it tells us
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Speaker 1: is that Jesus was invited, that his mother was there,
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Speaker 1: and that at some point during the celebration the wine
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Speaker 1: ran out. To modern ears, that sounds like a minor inconvenience,
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Speaker 1: an embarrassing logistical failure. But in first century Jewish culture,
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Speaker 1: in a small village in Galilee, running out of wine
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Speaker 1: at a wedding was not a minor inconvenience. A Jewish
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Speaker 1: wedding in that era was not a single evening. It
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Speaker 1: was a week long celebration. The entire community participated. The
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Speaker 1: host family was responsible for providing food and wine for
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Speaker 1: every guest every day from beginning to end. To run
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Speaker 1: out before the celebration was over was not simply awkward.
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Speaker 1: It was a serious failure of hospitality that could follow
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Speaker 1: a family for years. In a culture built on commit
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Speaker 1: unal honor, and reputation, where the standing of a family
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Speaker 1: shaped every relationship for generations, this was a genuine crisis. Mary,
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Speaker 1: the mother of Jesus, knows it. She finds her son
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Speaker 1: and says four words, they have no wine. She does
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Speaker 1: not ask him to do anything, She simply tells him
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Speaker 1: what is true. And there is something in those four
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Speaker 1: words that suggests she knows, or at least hopes that
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Speaker 1: he can do something about it. What happens next is
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Speaker 1: one of the strangest exchanges in the Gospel. Jesus says
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Speaker 1: to her woman, what does this have to do with me?
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Speaker 1: My hour has not yet come. The word woman in
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Speaker 1: this context is not cold or dismissive. In Greek. It
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Speaker 1: is the same word used to address a queen, but
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Speaker 1: it is formal, and the phrase what does this have
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Speaker 1: to do with me is a Greek idiom, meaning something
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Speaker 1: closer to what do we share? In this It is
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Speaker 1: a question about whether this situation and falls within his domain.
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Speaker 1: And then my hour has not yet come. This is
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Speaker 1: the first time the Gospel uses the word hour in
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Speaker 1: this way. It will not be the last. The word
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Speaker 1: appears again in chapter seven, Chapter eight, Chapter twelve, and
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Speaker 1: at the beginning of chapter thirteen, where the writer says
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Speaker 1: Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out
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Speaker 1: of this world. To the Father, the hour is always
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Speaker 1: the same hour, the hour of the cross, the hour
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Speaker 1: of completion. Here, at a wedding in Cana, before a
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Speaker 1: single public act has occurred, he is already measuring time
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Speaker 1: by that hour. And yet his mother turns to the
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Speaker 1: servants and says, do whatever he tells you. She does
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Speaker 1: not argue, she does not press him. She simply redirects
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Speaker 1: her attention to the people who can act, and tells
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Speaker 1: them to be ready whatever he says, do it. It
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Speaker 1: is the last recorded speech of Mary in this gospel,
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Speaker 1: and it is the most important thing any one in
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Speaker 1: the story says about how to encounter Jesus. Do whatever
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Speaker 1: he tells you. Now, the gospel gives a detail that
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Speaker 1: rewards careful attention. There were six stone water jars there
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Speaker 1: for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding between twenty
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Speaker 1: and thirty gallons. Six jars stone not clay, because stone
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Speaker 1: did not contract ritual impurity the way clay could. These
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Speaker 1: were not decorative. They held the water used for ritual washing,
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Speaker 1: the purification rights that Jewish law required before meals. Every
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Speaker 1: guest at this wedding would have used these jars. They
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Speaker 1: were full of water that had already served its purpose.
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Speaker 1: Jesus says, fill the jars with water. The servants fill
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Speaker 1: them to the brim. The gospel makes a point of
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Speaker 1: saying that to the brim not half way every jar
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Speaker 1: completely full. Now draw some out and take it to
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Speaker 1: the Master of the feast. They draw it out, and
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Speaker 1: what comes out is not water. The Gospel does not
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Speaker 1: describe the moment of transformation. There is no flash of light,
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Speaker 1: no dramatic pause, no explanation of how it happened. One moment,
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Speaker 1: the jars contain water. The next what is drawn from
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Speaker 1: them is wine, and not just wine. The master of
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Speaker 1: the feast calls the bridegroom and says, something that carries
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Speaker 1: more weight than it first appears. Everyone serves the good
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Speaker 1: wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the
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Speaker 1: poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.
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Speaker 1: He does not know where it came from. He is
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Speaker 1: simply observing that the order is backward. Usually the best
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Speaker 1: comes first and the quality diminishes. But here the best
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Speaker 1: has arrived last, after the ordinary supply was exhausted, after
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Speaker 1: the crisis, after the moment when anyone would have expected
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Speaker 1: the celebration to quietly wind down into embarrassment. The good
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Speaker 1: wine comes after. Now Here is what the six stone
23:07
Speaker 1: jars are actually doing in this story. Six is not
23:11
Speaker 1: seven In Jewish tradition. Seven is the number of completion
23:15
Speaker 1: of the Sabbath rest at the end of creation. Six
23:18
Speaker 1: is the number of incompletion, the number of human labor,
23:22
Speaker 1: the days of effort. Before rest arrives six stone jars
23:26
Speaker 1: filled with water for ritual purification. The entire system of
23:30
Speaker 1: human effort to make oneself acceptable before God represented in
23:35
Speaker 1: six stone jars standing in a courtyard in Cana. Jesus
23:40
Speaker 1: fills them to the brim and transforms their contents into
23:44
Speaker 1: something else. Entirely, the water of purification becomes the wine
23:49
Speaker 1: of celebration. What the six jars were trying to accomplish,
23:53
Speaker 1: the making clean, the preparation for the presence of God,
23:57
Speaker 1: Jesus does completely, and what he gives in return is
24:00
Speaker 1: not more of the same, but something of a different
24:02
Speaker 1: quality altogether, the best wine kept until now. The Gospel
24:08
Speaker 1: tells us this is the first of the signs, the
24:11
Speaker 1: works through which his glory was made visible, and through
24:14
Speaker 1: which the disciples who were with him believed. Now the
24:18
Speaker 1: scene shifts entirely. They traveled to Jerusalem for the Passover.
24:23
Speaker 1: Jesus walks into the temple courts and finds merchants selling
24:27
Speaker 1: oxen and sheep and pigeons, and money changers sitting at
24:30
Speaker 1: their tables. This was not illegal. Pilgrims coming from across
24:35
Speaker 1: the Roman world could not bring animals for sacrifice. On
24:38
Speaker 1: a long journey. The money changes existed because Roman coins
24:43
Speaker 1: bore the image of Caesar, which was not permitted in
24:46
Speaker 1: the Temple treasury. The system had a practical logic, but
24:51
Speaker 1: something about what he sees is not acceptable to him.
24:54
Speaker 1: He makes a whip out of cords. He drives out
24:57
Speaker 1: the sheep and the oxen. He pours out the coin
25:00
Speaker 1: and overturns the tables. He tells those selling pigeons to
25:03
Speaker 1: take them away. Stop making my father's house a house
25:07
Speaker 1: of trade. The disciples remember a line from the Psalms
25:12
Speaker 1: zeal for your house will consume me. The Jewish leaders
25:15
Speaker 1: who are present, ask a reasonable question, given what they
25:18
Speaker 1: have witnessed, what sign do you show us for doing
25:21
Speaker 1: these things? What gives you the authority? And Jesus says
25:26
Speaker 1: something that nobody in that moment understands. Destroy this temple,
25:30
Speaker 1: and in three days I will raise it up. Their
25:33
Speaker 1: response is almost comic in its literal mindedness. It has
25:37
Speaker 1: taken forty six years to build this temple, and you
25:40
Speaker 1: will raise it in three days. The renovation of the
25:44
Speaker 1: Second Temple had been ongoing for nearly half a century
25:47
Speaker 1: and was still not finished. The idea that anyone could
25:50
Speaker 1: rebuild it in three days is absurd. The Gospel explains
25:54
Speaker 1: immediately what Jesus meant, and does so with a precision
25:58
Speaker 1: that only makes sense in retrospect. He was speaking about
26:01
Speaker 1: the temple of his body. The disciples did not understand
26:05
Speaker 1: this at the time. They remembered it later after the resurrection,
26:10
Speaker 1: and then they understood and believed. The writer is doing
26:13
Speaker 1: something structurally significant by placing this event at the beginning
26:17
Speaker 1: rather than the end, where the other gospels place it,
26:21
Speaker 1: He is announcing the theme of the entire story in
26:23
Speaker 1: its opening two chapters. The old is being replaced, not discarded, fulfilled, transformed.
26:32
Speaker 1: The water of purification becomes wine. The temple of stone
26:36
Speaker 1: becomes the temple of his body. The external system of
26:40
Speaker 1: ritual and sacrifice is being surpassed by something personal, something
26:44
Speaker 1: that can be destroyed and raised in three days. The
26:47
Speaker 1: Gospel closes the chapter with an observation that ties everything together.
26:52
Speaker 1: Many believed in his name when they saw the signs
26:55
Speaker 1: he was doing, but Jesus, on his part, did not
26:58
Speaker 1: intrust himself to them, because because he knew all people
27:01
Speaker 1: and needed no one to bear witness about man, for
27:04
Speaker 1: he himself knew what was in man. Many believed the
27:08
Speaker 1: signs produced belief, but he did not intrust himself to
27:12
Speaker 1: that belief. The Gospel is making a distinction between belief
27:16
Speaker 1: produced by spectacle and belief that runs deeper. He knows
27:20
Speaker 1: what belief produced by spectacle looks like. When the spectacle ends,
27:25
Speaker 1: we are about to meet someone who does not come
27:27
Speaker 1: in the crowd in the daylight for the spectacle, someone
27:31
Speaker 1: who comes at night alone with questions that cannot be
27:35
Speaker 1: asked in public. And in that night time conversation he
27:39
Speaker 1: will say the sentence that has been repeated more often
27:42
Speaker 1: than almost any other sentence in history. Something old is
27:45
Speaker 1: being replaced, something better is being poured out, and the best,
27:50
Speaker 1: as it turns out, has been kept until now. Chapter
27:56
Speaker 1: three a man who came in the dark. His name
28:01
Speaker 1: is Nicodemus. The Gospel tells us three things about him immediately.
28:06
Speaker 1: He is a Pharisee, he is a ruler of the Jews,
28:10
Speaker 1: and he came to Jesus by night. Each detail matters,
28:14
Speaker 1: and the writer places them in exactly that order. For
28:17
Speaker 1: a reason, the Pharisees were not, despite how they are
28:21
Speaker 1: sometimes remembered simply the villains of the Gospel story. They
28:26
Speaker 1: were the most serious religious movement in first century Judaism, laymen,
28:31
Speaker 1: not priests, who had chosen devotion without the benefit of
28:34
Speaker 1: institutional position. They believed deeply in the authority of Scripture
28:39
Speaker 1: and in the possibility that ordinary Jewish life could be
28:42
Speaker 1: lived in genuine holiness before God. Their project was sincere.
28:47
Speaker 1: Many of them were genuinely devout. Nicodemus is not just
28:51
Speaker 1: a pharisee. He is a ruler of the Jews. The
28:55
Speaker 1: term the Gospel uses suggests membership in the Sanhedrin, the
29:00
Speaker 1: council of seventy that served as the highest religious and
29:03
Speaker 1: legal authority in Jewish life. This is a man of
29:06
Speaker 1: significant power, a man with position and reputation accumulated over
29:11
Speaker 1: a lifetime of scholarship and public service. He is also
29:15
Speaker 1: a man who cannot come to Jesus in the daylight.
29:19
Speaker 1: We do not know exactly why he comes at night.
29:22
Speaker 1: The Gospel does not explain it, but the writer never
29:25
Speaker 1: includes details accidentally, and the darkness surrounding this visit has
29:30
Speaker 1: been felt by careful readers for two thousand years. He
29:34
Speaker 1: is afraid of what it would cost him to be seen.
29:37
Speaker 1: He is coming, but he is coming carefully, in the
29:41
Speaker 1: way that powerful people approach things that threaten their power.
29:45
Speaker 1: Or perhaps it is simpler than that. Perhaps he is
29:49
Speaker 1: a man who has spent his entire life performing his
29:52
Speaker 1: faith before an audience and to night he wants to
29:56
Speaker 1: ask his real questions when no one is watching. Open
30:00
Speaker 1: the conversation with a statement rather than a question. Rabbi,
30:04
Speaker 1: we know that you are a teacher. Come from God.
30:07
Speaker 1: For no one can do these signs that you do
30:10
Speaker 1: unless God is with him. This is a generous opening.
30:14
Speaker 1: He is not coming to test or to trap. He
30:17
Speaker 1: is coming with genuine acknowledgment. He has seen the signs,
30:21
Speaker 1: he has drawn a conclusion. He is extending that conclusion
30:26
Speaker 1: as an opening towards something he has not yet been
30:28
Speaker 1: able to name. Jesus does not receive it as a compliment.
30:32
Speaker 1: He responds as if Nicodemus had asked a question that
30:35
Speaker 1: Nicodemus himself does not yet know he is asking truly. Truly,
30:40
Speaker 1: I say to you, unless one is born again, he
30:43
Speaker 1: cannot see the Kingdom of God. In the original Greek,
30:47
Speaker 1: the word translated again is anothan. And here something important
30:52
Speaker 1: happens that the written text preserves with particular beauty. Anothan
30:57
Speaker 1: carries two meanings simultaneously. It means again, as in a
31:02
Speaker 1: second time, and it also means from above, as in
31:05
Speaker 1: from heaven. A Greek speaker encountering this word would feel
31:09
Speaker 1: both meanings pressing against each other at once. Nicodemus hears
31:13
Speaker 1: one meaning, Jesus intends the other, possibly both. Nicodemus responds
31:20
Speaker 1: with the confusion of a man who has taken the
31:22
Speaker 1: literal reading. How can a man be born when he
31:25
Speaker 1: is old? Can he enter a second time into his
31:28
Speaker 1: mother's womb and be born? He is not being absurd.
31:32
Speaker 1: He is one of the most educated people in Israel.
31:36
Speaker 1: He knows he is not being asked to re enter
31:38
Speaker 1: a womb. He is pushing back on the image, exposing
31:41
Speaker 1: what he hears as its impossibility, trying to get Jesus
31:45
Speaker 1: to say more clearly what he actually means. Jesus expands,
31:50
Speaker 1: unless one is born of water and the spirit, he
31:53
Speaker 1: cannot enter the Kingdom of God. That which is born
31:56
Speaker 1: of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born
31:59
Speaker 1: of the spirit is spirit. Two berths. The first is
32:03
Speaker 1: the birth every human being experiences. The second is something else, entirely,
32:10
Speaker 1: something that does not come from human will, or human effort,
32:13
Speaker 1: or human lineage. Something that comes from above. Do not
32:18
Speaker 1: marvel that I said to you, you must be born again.
32:21
Speaker 1: The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear it sound,
32:25
Speaker 1: but you do not know where it comes from or
32:27
Speaker 1: where it goes. So it is with every one who
32:30
Speaker 1: is born of the spirit. In Greek, the word for
32:33
Speaker 1: wind and the word for spirit are the same word
32:36
Speaker 1: pinaoma wind, breath, spirit, the natural world pointing at something
32:43
Speaker 1: that operates by the same principle real. You can hear it,
32:48
Speaker 1: you can feel its effects, but you cannot control it
32:51
Speaker 1: or produce it by your own effort. It comes from
32:54
Speaker 1: where it comes from and goes where it goes. Nicodemus asks,
32:59
Speaker 1: how can these things be? Jesus says, you are the
33:03
Speaker 1: teacher of Israel, and you do not know these things.
33:07
Speaker 1: There is no contempt in that observation. There is something
33:10
Speaker 1: that sounds more like sorrow. The man sitting across from
33:14
Speaker 1: him has spent his life studying the very texts that
33:17
Speaker 1: were supposed to prepare Israel for this moment, and the
33:20
Speaker 1: moment has arrived and he does not recognize it. But
33:25
Speaker 1: then the conversation shifts, and what follows is no longer
33:29
Speaker 1: addressed to Nicodemus alone. For God so loved the world
33:33
Speaker 1: that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in
33:36
Speaker 1: him should not perish, but have eternal life. If you
33:40
Speaker 1: have grown up anywhere near Christianity, you have heard this sentence.
33:45
Speaker 1: You may have encountered it so many times that it
33:47
Speaker 1: has lost through sheer familiarity, the weight it was meant
33:50
Speaker 1: to carry. Let me try to give it back to
33:53
Speaker 1: you to night. The sentence begins with a scope. God
33:58
Speaker 1: so loved the world, not Israel, not the righteous, not
34:03
Speaker 1: the people who have their theology correct or their behavior
34:06
Speaker 1: in order the world. The Greek word is cosmos, the
34:11
Speaker 1: entire created order, the whole of humanity, in all its
34:14
Speaker 1: complexity and failure and beauty and brokenness. The God, who
34:19
Speaker 1: had entered into covenant with one particular people, is here
34:22
Speaker 1: revealed as loving not one people, but the whole world.
34:26
Speaker 1: The verb loved in Greek is egapaesen, the past tense
34:30
Speaker 1: of agapao. This is not love as feeling or preference.
34:34
Speaker 1: This is love as determined, costly, self giving action, the
34:39
Speaker 1: kind of love defined not by what it feels, but
34:41
Speaker 1: by what it does, and what it did was give.
34:45
Speaker 1: He gave his only son. The word only translates the
34:49
Speaker 1: Greek monogens unique, one of a kind, the only one
34:55
Speaker 1: of its kind, the language of cost. There was only one,
35:00
Speaker 1: and he was given that whoever believes in him should
35:04
Speaker 1: not perish, but have eternal life, whoever no calification, no
35:10
Speaker 1: prior condition of worthiness or heritage or religious background, whoever believes.
35:16
Speaker 1: The same universality that appeared in the Prolog appears again here.
35:20
Speaker 1: The offer is not narrowed. It is extended as far
35:24
Speaker 1: as language can extend it. And then the Gospel adds
35:27
Speaker 1: the context that makes the gift make sense. For God
35:31
Speaker 1: did not send his son into the world to condemn
35:33
Speaker 1: the world, but in order that the world might be
35:36
Speaker 1: saved through him. This one sentence has the power to
35:39
Speaker 1: undo a great deal of religious damage. Many people who
35:42
Speaker 1: grew up with some exposure to Christianity carry an image
35:46
Speaker 1: of God as primarily a judge, a figure whose default
35:49
Speaker 1: posture toward human failure is condemnation. The Gospel of John
35:54
Speaker 1: is not describing that God. It is describing a God
35:58
Speaker 1: whose motivation sending his son into the world was not condemnation.
36:04
Speaker 1: It was rescue. The world was perishing. The Sun was
36:08
Speaker 1: sent not to confirm the perishing, but to interrupt it,
36:11
Speaker 1: to offer a way out that cost nothing but belief,
36:14
Speaker 1: and cost everything but effort, not to condemn, but to save.
36:20
Speaker 1: Now the Gospel introduces the images of light and darkness again,
36:23
Speaker 1: but now with an application that reaches toward every person
36:26
Speaker 1: reading or listening. This is the judgment. The light has
36:31
Speaker 1: come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather
36:34
Speaker 1: than the light. For everyone who does wicked things hates
36:37
Speaker 1: the light and does not come to the light. But
36:40
Speaker 1: whoever does what is true comes to the light. Nicodemus
36:44
Speaker 1: came in the darkness, carefully, with his reputation protected. But
36:50
Speaker 1: he came. He came toward the light, even at night,
36:53
Speaker 1: even without anyone seeing him. And the Gospel, unlike the
36:57
Speaker 1: other three, does not close the story of Niccodydus here.
37:01
Speaker 1: He appears again in chapter seven, when the Sanhedrin is
37:04
Speaker 1: discussing what to do about Jesus, A voice from within
37:07
Speaker 1: the council says, does our Lord judge a man without
37:11
Speaker 1: first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?
37:14
Speaker 1: The other members dismiss the speaker. The Gospel tells Us.
37:18
Speaker 1: His name it is Nicodemus. He appears a third time
37:23
Speaker 1: after the crucifixion. A man named Joseph of Arimathea asks
37:28
Speaker 1: Pilot for the body of Jesus, and who comes with
37:31
Speaker 1: him carrying a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy
37:35
Speaker 1: five pounds of it, enough for the burial of a king. Nicodemus,
37:40
Speaker 1: the man who came in the dark, is the man
37:42
Speaker 1: who buries Jesus in the open, in daylight, in front
37:46
Speaker 1: of everyone, caring nothing now for what it costs him.
37:50
Speaker 1: The Gospel does not explain the transformation. It does not
37:54
Speaker 1: need to. The ark of Nicodemus, across three chapters is
37:58
Speaker 1: its own testimony. Something planted in the dark grew slowly
38:02
Speaker 1: through the middle chapters, through the rising conflict and the
38:06
Speaker 1: mounting danger, until it flowered in the most public possible
38:09
Speaker 1: act of love and grief. The darkness Nicodemus carried into
38:13
Speaker 1: that first conversation was not held against him. The light
38:17
Speaker 1: received him anyway, and over time, without drama, without a
38:22
Speaker 1: single recorded moment of formal decision, he moved all the
38:25
Speaker 1: way from the shadows into the open. That is what
38:28
Speaker 1: the light does to people. Who come toward it, however, cautiously,
38:33
Speaker 1: however slowly, however, late at night. The Gospel closes the
38:37
Speaker 1: chapter with John the Baptist brought in as a coda
38:41
Speaker 1: to make sure something is clear before the story moves forward.
38:45
Speaker 1: The Baptist's disciples are troubled. Every one is going to
38:49
Speaker 1: Jesus now. The crowds that once gathered around John are shifting.
38:53
Speaker 1: John the Baptist says something that has been remembered for
38:56
Speaker 1: two thousand years. He must increase, but I must decrease.
39:02
Speaker 1: He is not sad about this. He uses an image
39:05
Speaker 1: to explain he is the friend of the bridegroom, not
39:09
Speaker 1: the bridegroom himself, the friend who stands at the door
39:12
Speaker 1: and hears the bridegroom's voice, and whose joy is made
39:15
Speaker 1: complete by that sound. His role was always to make way,
39:20
Speaker 1: to point, to decrease, so that the one he was
39:23
Speaker 1: pointing toward could increase. The chapter closes on the most
39:27
Speaker 1: personal choice the Gospel ever offers. Whoever believes in the
39:31
Speaker 1: sun has eternal life. Believe or not believe, come toward
39:37
Speaker 1: the light or away from it. Nicodemus came toward it
39:41
Speaker 1: in the dark, slowly at great cost to himself, and
39:45
Speaker 1: he made it. Chapter four, The Woman at the Well.
39:53
Speaker 1: It is the sixth hour in the Reckoning of the
39:56
Speaker 1: first century. That means noon. The sun is direc overhead,
40:01
Speaker 1: the shadows have disappeared. The heat in the hill country
40:04
Speaker 1: of Samaria presses down with the weight of a Palestinian
40:08
Speaker 1: summer afternoon. Everyone who has any sense is inside. The
40:13
Speaker 1: Gospel tells us the hour the same way it tells
40:15
Speaker 1: us Nicodemus came at night. The detail is a signal
40:19
Speaker 1: pay attention to who is out in the heat of
40:21
Speaker 1: the day when everyone else has retreated from it. Jesus
40:25
Speaker 1: is sitting beside a well. He is tired, the Gospel says,
40:30
Speaker 1: tired from the journey. It is one of those small,
40:33
Speaker 1: specific human details the writer records without elaboration, and it matters.
40:39
Speaker 1: The logos through whom all things were made, is sitting
40:41
Speaker 1: beside a well in the midday heat, tired from walking.
40:45
Speaker 1: His disciples have gone into town to buy food. He
40:49
Speaker 1: is alone, and a woman comes to draw water. We
40:53
Speaker 1: do not know her name. The Gospel never gives it,
40:56
Speaker 1: but in the economy of this story, where names are
40:59
Speaker 1: given carely and withheld, deliberately. Her anonymity is not a diminishment,
41:04
Speaker 1: It is an invitation. She is every person who has
41:08
Speaker 1: ever come to a place of ordinary necessity and found
41:11
Speaker 1: something there they were not looking for. She is a Samaritan.
41:15
Speaker 1: That single word carries the weight of seven hundred years
41:18
Speaker 1: of conflict. To understand what happens at this well, you
41:22
Speaker 1: need to understand what a Samaritan was in first century
41:25
Speaker 1: Jewish life. In approximately seven hundred and twenty years before Christ,
41:30
Speaker 1: the Assyrian Empire conquered the northern Kingdom of Israel and
41:33
Speaker 1: deported much of its population. They repopulated the land with
41:37
Speaker 1: peoples from other parts of their empire, who intermarried with
41:41
Speaker 1: the remaining Israelites and developed a form of faith that
41:44
Speaker 1: incorporated the Torah but rejected the Jerusalem Temple. The Samaritans
41:49
Speaker 1: believed they were the true heirs of Moses. The Jews
41:53
Speaker 1: believed the Samaritans had corrupted the faith beyond recognition. Seven
41:58
Speaker 1: hundred years of mutual contempt, seven hundred years of a
42:02
Speaker 1: border that was more than geographical. Many Jewish travelers going
42:06
Speaker 1: between Galilee and Judea would cross the Jordan River and
42:10
Speaker 1: take the long way around, rather than pass through Samaria.
42:13
Speaker 1: The Gospel notes that Jesus had to pass through Samaria.
42:17
Speaker 1: The Greek suggests a necessity that is more than geographical,
42:21
Speaker 1: not because there was no other route, because there was
42:24
Speaker 1: some one in Samaria that required him to be there.
42:28
Speaker 1: Jesus looks at the woman approaching the well and says,
42:31
Speaker 1: give me a drink. Four words as simply request. But
42:36
Speaker 1: in the world of the first century, those four words
42:39
Speaker 1: are crossing several boundaries simultaneously. Rabbinical writings from this era
42:44
Speaker 1: are frequently counsel against Jewish men initiating conversations with women
42:49
Speaker 1: in public. When the disciples return later and find Jesus
42:53
Speaker 1: speaking with this woman, the Gospel tells us they marvel.
42:56
Speaker 1: They do not say anything, but they marvel, And a
43:00
Speaker 1: Jewish man certainly did not ask a Samaritan woman for anything.
43:04
Speaker 1: The vessels of Samaritans were considered ritually unclean by many
43:08
Speaker 1: Jewish authorities of this period. To drink from a vessel
43:11
Speaker 1: she had handled would be, in a strict interpretation, to
43:15
Speaker 1: make yourself impure. He asks. Anyway, the woman is not intimidated,
43:21
Speaker 1: she is direct. How is it that you, a Jew,
43:25
Speaker 1: ask for a drink from me? A woman of Samaria.
43:29
Speaker 1: She sees the boundary crossing as clearly as he does.
43:32
Speaker 1: She names it. She has lived her whole life inside
43:36
Speaker 1: those walls. Jesus says, if you knew the gift of
43:40
Speaker 1: God and who it is that is saying to you
43:42
Speaker 1: give me a drink, you would have asked him and
43:45
Speaker 1: he would have given you living water, living water. The
43:49
Speaker 1: phrase in Greek is hide'ors on, and it carries a
43:52
Speaker 1: practical meaning and a spiritual meaning simultaneously. In practical terms,
43:58
Speaker 1: living water means flowing water from a spring or a river,
44:02
Speaker 1: as opposed to still water collected in a cistern, fresher cleaner.
44:08
Speaker 1: The woman hears this meaning first, she responds with what
44:11
Speaker 1: sounds almost like dry humor. Sir, you have nothing to
44:15
Speaker 1: draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do
44:18
Speaker 1: you get that living water? Are you greater than our
44:22
Speaker 1: father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from
44:25
Speaker 1: it himself and his sons and his live stock. She
44:29
Speaker 1: is sharp. She is referencing shared heritage, the patriarch Jacob,
44:34
Speaker 1: claimed by both Jews and Samaritans as an ancestor. She
44:38
Speaker 1: is saying, this well has been here since Jacob. What
44:42
Speaker 1: do you have that is better. Jesus says, everyone who
44:47
Speaker 1: drinks of this water will be thirsty again. But whoever
44:50
Speaker 1: drinks of the water that I will give him will
44:52
Speaker 1: never be thirsty again. The water that I will give
44:55
Speaker 1: him will become in him, a spring of water welling
44:58
Speaker 1: up to eternal life, a spring arising from within rather
45:02
Speaker 1: than drawn from outside, not a provision that runs out,
45:06
Speaker 1: but a source that becomes self renewing. The Gospel has
45:10
Speaker 1: been building an image of water with careful intention. At Cana,
45:14
Speaker 1: the water of purification became wine. At the temple, he
45:18
Speaker 1: spoke of a body that would be raised. Now at
45:21
Speaker 1: a well in Sumaria, he describes water that becomes a
45:25
Speaker 1: spring within a person. He will return to this image
45:28
Speaker 1: in chapter seven and one final time, at the very
45:32
Speaker 1: end of everything, when water flows from the cross. The
45:35
Speaker 1: woman does not yet know she is standing inside a
45:38
Speaker 1: pattern that spans the entire Gospel. She hears what she hears,
45:43
Speaker 1: and what she hears is the promise of never being
45:46
Speaker 1: thirsty again, of never having to come to this well
45:49
Speaker 1: at noon alone, when every one else has found shade. Sir,
45:54
Speaker 1: give me this water so that I will not be
45:56
Speaker 1: thirsty or have to come here to draw water. There
46:00
Speaker 1: is something in that sentence that sounds tired, not just
46:03
Speaker 1: physically tired, tired in the way a person gets when
46:07
Speaker 1: a certain part of their life has been the same
46:09
Speaker 1: difficult thing for a very long time. And then Jesus
46:13
Speaker 1: says something that changes the entire register of the conversation.
46:17
Speaker 1: Go call your husband and come here. She says, I
46:22
Speaker 1: have no husband. He says, you are right. You have
46:26
Speaker 1: had five husbands, and the one you now have is
46:29
Speaker 1: not your husband. What you have said is true. This
46:33
Speaker 1: is not a confrontation. It is a revelation. He is
46:37
Speaker 1: not exposing her to shame her. He is showing her
46:41
Speaker 1: that he already knows her completely and is still speaking
46:43
Speaker 1: to her. And here is what the historical context makes important,
46:48
Speaker 1: though the text itself does not say it directly. In
46:51
Speaker 1: the legal and social world of first century Palestine, women
46:55
Speaker 1: had far less power than men to initiate or resist divorce.
47:00
Speaker 1: Us most first century Jewish legal settings, the right to
47:03
Speaker 1: formally end a marriage belonged primarily to the husband. A
47:07
Speaker 1: woman could find herself divorced for reasons that had nothing
47:10
Speaker 1: to do with her choices. She could not easily leave.
47:14
Speaker 1: She could be left five husbands each one a chapter
47:18
Speaker 1: in a life she did not fully write. And now
47:21
Speaker 1: she is living with a man who has not married her,
47:24
Speaker 1: perhaps because he cannot, perhaps because she is no longer
47:27
Speaker 1: considered marriageable in the village where she lives. She comes
47:31
Speaker 1: to the well at noon because the women who come
47:33
Speaker 1: in the morning and the evening in their groups, with
47:36
Speaker 1: their shared history and their easy conversation, do not make
47:40
Speaker 1: room for her. Jesus knows all of this. He says
47:44
Speaker 1: it plainly, without judgment, as a simple statement of truth.
47:49
Speaker 1: And her response is not to fall apart. It is
47:52
Speaker 1: to recognize that something unusual is happening. Sir, I perceive
47:57
Speaker 1: that you are a prophet. She pivots immediately to theology,
48:01
Speaker 1: and her pivot is not an evasion. It is the
48:05
Speaker 1: instinct of a serious person who has suddenly found herself
48:08
Speaker 1: in the presence of someone who might actually be able
48:11
Speaker 1: to answer the question that has been underneath her life.
48:15
Speaker 1: Our father's worshiped on this mountain, but you say that
48:18
Speaker 1: in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.
48:21
Speaker 1: This is the central theological dispute between Samaritans and Jews,
48:27
Speaker 1: the location of true worship. Seven hundred years of disagreement
48:31
Speaker 1: compressed into one sentence. She is asking whose side are
48:35
Speaker 1: you on. Jesus refuses to take a side. Woman, Believe me,
48:41
Speaker 1: the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor
48:44
Speaker 1: in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. But the hour
48:47
Speaker 1: is coming and is now here, when the true worshippers
48:51
Speaker 1: will worship the Father in spirit and truth. For the
48:54
Speaker 1: Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit,
48:58
Speaker 1: and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.
49:02
Speaker 1: The hour is coming and is now here. That phrase again.
49:06
Speaker 1: And what this hour brings is not the victory of
49:09
Speaker 1: one location over another. It brings the end of location
49:12
Speaker 1: as the defining question. The external marker of the correct
49:16
Speaker 1: mountain is being replaced by an internal reality. She says,
49:21
Speaker 1: I know that Messiah is coming. When he comes, he
49:25
Speaker 1: will tell us all things. It is the most open
49:28
Speaker 1: sentence in the conversation, an expression of hope and also
49:32
Speaker 1: of limitation. I know he is coming, I do not
49:36
Speaker 1: know when. And Jesus says, without parable or metaphor or
49:40
Speaker 1: any kind of indirection, I who speak to you am he.
49:45
Speaker 1: This is the first time in this gospel that Jesus
49:47
Speaker 1: makes an unambiguous direct explicit claim to be the Messiah,
49:52
Speaker 1: not to the disciples, not to crowds in Jerusalem, not
49:57
Speaker 1: in the temple, at a well, is Samaria, to a
50:01
Speaker 1: woman with no social standing, to the person the first
50:05
Speaker 1: century world would have considered the least qualified recipient of
50:08
Speaker 1: such a revelation. I who speak to you am he?
50:12
Speaker 1: The disciples return and find him speaking with her. They marvel.
50:17
Speaker 1: None of them ask what he is seeking or why
50:19
Speaker 1: he is speaking with her. The question is present in
50:22
Speaker 1: their silence, they choose not to voice it, and the
50:25
Speaker 1: woman leaves her water jar. She came to the well
50:29
Speaker 1: to draw water. She is leaving without water because she
50:32
Speaker 1: has found something for which she no longer needs the jar.
50:35
Speaker 1: She goes into the town and says to the people there,
50:39
Speaker 1: come see a man who told me all that I
50:41
Speaker 1: ever did? Can this be the Christ? She does not
50:45
Speaker 1: preach a sermon. She invites people to come and see,
50:48
Speaker 1: and she frames the invitation around her own experience. He
50:52
Speaker 1: knew me, Come and find out if this is the
50:55
Speaker 1: one we have been waiting for. The people come out
50:58
Speaker 1: of the town and begin walking to Jesus. Many Samaritans
51:02
Speaker 1: believe because of her testimony, and when they speak to
51:05
Speaker 1: her again after meeting Jesus themselves, they say something worth
51:09
Speaker 1: sitting with in the dark to night. It is no
51:12
Speaker 1: longer because of what you said that we believe, for
51:15
Speaker 1: we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this
51:17
Speaker 1: is indeed the Savior of the world, not of Israel,
51:21
Speaker 1: not of one people or one side of a seven
51:24
Speaker 1: hundred year argument, the Savior of the world. A woman
51:28
Speaker 1: at a well at noon, alone, carrying the accumulated weight
51:32
Speaker 1: of a life she did not entirely choose, was among
51:35
Speaker 1: the first in this gospel to hear those words from
51:38
Speaker 1: the source. And she told the people who had not
51:41
Speaker 1: made room for her, and they came, and they believed.
51:45
Speaker 1: The jar she left at the well is still there
51:48
Speaker 1: in the imagination of this gospel, empty no longer needed.
51:53
Speaker 1: She found what she came for, and it was not water.
51:57
Speaker 1: The well is quiet now the heat of the afternoon
52:00
Speaker 1: has passed. Let the image of a woman walking back
52:03
Speaker 1: into a town that had excluded her, carrying news too
52:06
Speaker 1: large for any jar to hold, stay with you as
52:09
Speaker 1: you fall towards sleep. The living water is already rising.
52:15
Speaker 1: Chapter five. I am seven statements. That is what this
52:22
Speaker 1: gospel preserves. Distributed across its twenty one chapters, each one
52:27
Speaker 1: beginning the same way two words in Greek egor amy
52:32
Speaker 1: i am. In the religious world of the first century,
52:36
Speaker 1: those two words carried a weight that can easily be
52:39
Speaker 1: missed by modern readers. The divine name in Hebrew, the
52:43
Speaker 1: name considered too sacred to be spoken aloud, has long
52:46
Speaker 1: been connected by scholars and ancient tradition to the Hebrew
52:49
Speaker 1: verb to be suggesting the self existent one, the one
52:53
Speaker 1: who simply and completely is. Many Christian readers across the
52:57
Speaker 1: centuries have heard in the words ego amy an echo
53:01
Speaker 1: of that name, a resonance with the voice that spoke
53:04
Speaker 1: from the burning bush and told Moses, I am who
53:08
Speaker 1: I am. Tell them, I Am has sent you. Whether
53:12
Speaker 1: the first readers of this Gospel heard that echo or
53:15
Speaker 1: felt something else entirely, what the Gospel is doing with
53:18
Speaker 1: these two words is unmistakable. The seven statements are not
53:22
Speaker 1: simply descriptions of what Jesus offers. They are a portrait
53:26
Speaker 1: of who he is. The seven statements are these, I
53:30
Speaker 1: am the Bread of life, I am the Light of
53:33
Speaker 1: the world. I am the Door, I am the Good Shepherd,
53:38
Speaker 1: I am the Resurrection and the life I am the Way,
53:43
Speaker 1: the Truth, and the Life. I am the True Vine.
53:48
Speaker 1: Seven the number of completion in Jewish tradition, seven days
53:52
Speaker 1: of creation, and on the seventh rest seven statements, and
53:57
Speaker 1: in them a complete portrait distribut across the chapters that follow.
54:02
Speaker 1: They do not all arrive at once. Each one is
54:05
Speaker 1: placed in a specific moment that gives it a specific meaning.
54:10
Speaker 1: Understanding them requires walking through the moments that surround them.
54:14
Speaker 1: The first arrives in chapter six, after one of the
54:17
Speaker 1: most remarkable events in the Gospel. Five thousand people are
54:21
Speaker 1: gathered on a hillside. It is late in the day.
54:24
Speaker 1: The disciples assess the situation and conclude that the logistics
54:28
Speaker 1: are impossible. There is a boy with five barley loaves
54:32
Speaker 1: and two fish. That is all. Jesus takes the bread
54:36
Speaker 1: he gives thanks he distributes it. Five thousand people eat,
54:42
Speaker 1: and when the fragments are gathered, twelve baskets remain more
54:47
Speaker 1: at the end than at the beginning. The pattern from
54:50
Speaker 1: Cana repeats, what he gives is always more than what
54:53
Speaker 1: was there before he gave it. The crowd is electrified.
54:58
Speaker 1: This is the profit they have been waiting for, for
55:00
Speaker 1: this is the one who will be king. The Gospel
55:04
Speaker 1: tells us that Jesus, perceiving they were about to come
55:07
Speaker 1: and take him by force to make him king, withdrew
55:10
Speaker 1: to the mountain alone. They want a political messiah, a
55:15
Speaker 1: king who will feed them and fight for them. They
55:18
Speaker 1: have received a miracle of provision and drawn exactly the
55:21
Speaker 1: wrong conclusion from it. That night, the disciples are crossing
55:25
Speaker 1: the lake. The wind is against them. They have been
55:29
Speaker 1: rowing for several hours in the dark, and then they
55:32
Speaker 1: see Jesus walking on the water toward them. He says,
55:36
Speaker 1: it is I do not be afraid in Greek egor amy,
55:42
Speaker 1: I am do not be afraid, the two words spoken
55:46
Speaker 1: in the middle of a storm on a dark lake,
55:49
Speaker 1: And immediately the Gospel tells us the boat was at
55:52
Speaker 1: the shore. The next morning, the crowd finds him on
55:55
Speaker 1: the other side and asks how he got there. He
55:59
Speaker 1: sees through the question to what is underneath it. You
56:02
Speaker 1: are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but
56:05
Speaker 1: because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not
56:08
Speaker 1: work for the food that perishes, but for the food
56:10
Speaker 1: that endures to eternal life. They ask what must we
56:14
Speaker 1: do to do the works of God? He says, this
56:18
Speaker 1: is the work of God, that you believe in Him
56:21
Speaker 1: whom he has sent. They ask for a sign. They
56:24
Speaker 1: reference Moses and the manner in the wilderness. Their ancestors
56:28
Speaker 1: ate bread from heaven. What will you give us? And
56:32
Speaker 1: Jesus gives them the first I am statement. I am
56:35
Speaker 1: the bread of life. Whoever comes to me shall not hunger,
56:39
Speaker 1: and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. He is
56:42
Speaker 1: not offering to feed them again. He is offering himself,
56:47
Speaker 1: not a provision to be consumed and then sought again
56:50
Speaker 1: when hunger returns a person the bread of life, the
56:55
Speaker 1: source that once received does not run out. There is
56:58
Speaker 1: a man named James. He is fifty seven years old
57:02
Speaker 1: and he lives in a small house in Knoxville, Tennessee.
57:05
Speaker 1: He grew up Catholic, drifted away in his thirties, came
57:09
Speaker 1: back slowly in his fifties after his wife died. He
57:12
Speaker 1: is not sure what he believes about most things theological,
57:16
Speaker 1: but he is sure that something happened in him during
57:18
Speaker 1: the year after her death that he cannot explain in
57:21
Speaker 1: language that does not sound like faith. He is listening
57:24
Speaker 1: to night because he cannot sleep. He has been lying
57:27
Speaker 1: in the dark for an hour, and his mind will
57:30
Speaker 1: not quiet. He does not know it yet, but the
57:33
Speaker 1: first I Am statement is about to land somewhere in
57:36
Speaker 1: him that has been waiting for exactly. This the bread
57:39
Speaker 1: of life, not a doctrine, not an institution, A person
57:45
Speaker 1: you can come to when you are hungry and have
57:47
Speaker 1: no words left. For what kind of hungry you are?
57:50
Speaker 1: The crowd grumbles when Jesus says this. They know his
57:54
Speaker 1: father and mother. He is from Nazareth. How can he
57:57
Speaker 1: say he came down from heaven? He says, as it again.
58:01
Speaker 1: My flesh is true food, my blood is true drink.
58:05
Speaker 1: Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides
58:09
Speaker 1: in me, and I in him. This is too much
58:12
Speaker 1: for many of them. The language is visceral and strange.
58:16
Speaker 1: The Gospel tells us that many disciples, not the twelve,
58:19
Speaker 1: but the larger group that had been following him, turned back.
58:23
Speaker 1: They stopped following him that day. Jesus turns to the twelve.
58:28
Speaker 1: Do you want to go away as well? Simon Peter says, Lord,
58:32
Speaker 1: to whom shall we go? You have the words of
58:35
Speaker 1: eternal life. We have believed and have come to know
58:39
Speaker 1: that you are the Holy One of God to whom
58:43
Speaker 1: shall we go? One of the most honest sentences in
58:46
Speaker 1: this gospel, not a triumphant declaration of certainty, an honest,
58:51
Speaker 1: acknowledgment that despite the difficulty, despite the things that are
58:54
Speaker 1: hard to understand, there is nowhere else to go, because
58:58
Speaker 1: nowhere else has what is here. James understands that sentence
59:02
Speaker 1: in a way he did not expect to understand anything.
59:05
Speaker 1: Tonight he has felt it, not a certainty, but as
59:09
Speaker 1: the quiet recognition that the alternative, the absence of all this,
59:13
Speaker 1: is a worse kind of emptiness. He could not have
59:16
Speaker 1: said that three years ago. Tonight it makes sense to
59:20
Speaker 1: him in a way that surprises him. The scene shifts Jerusalem,
59:26
Speaker 1: the Temple the Feast of Tabernacles, one of the three
59:29
Speaker 1: great annual pilgrimage feasts. Jerusalem is crowded. On the last
59:35
Speaker 1: day of the feast, the greatest day, Jesus stands up
59:38
Speaker 1: and cries out across the temple courts. He does not
59:41
Speaker 1: speak quietly. He cries out in the crowd so that
59:45
Speaker 1: everyone can hear. If anyone thirsts, let him come to
59:49
Speaker 1: me and drink whoever believes in me, As the scripture
59:53
Speaker 1: has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of
59:56
Speaker 1: living water, the image of water again, not a well,
1:00:02
Speaker 1: not a spring, rivers plural, flowing from within the believer
1:00:08
Speaker 1: outward toward others. The crowd divides. Some say he is
1:00:13
Speaker 1: the prophet, some say he is the Christ. Some say
1:00:17
Speaker 1: the Christ cannot come from Galilee. The Pharisees send officers
1:00:22
Speaker 1: to arrest him. The officers return empty handed. Why did
1:00:26
Speaker 1: you not bring him, they say, No one ever spoke
1:00:30
Speaker 1: like this man. Nicodemus is in that room, he speaks.
1:00:35
Speaker 1: Does our Lord judge a man without first giving him
1:00:38
Speaker 1: a hearing? The others dismiss him. Are you from Galilee? Too?
1:00:42
Speaker 1: Nicodemus does not press the point. He is not ready
1:00:46
Speaker 1: yet to go further. But he has spoken. It cost
1:00:50
Speaker 1: him something to say even that much. In that room,
1:00:52
Speaker 1: the seed planted in the dark is still growing. The
1:00:56
Speaker 1: next day in the temple, another confrontation, and the second
1:01:01
Speaker 1: I am statement. I am the light of the world.
1:01:04
Speaker 1: Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will
1:01:08
Speaker 1: have the light of life. Not a principle, not a philosophy.
1:01:13
Speaker 1: A person you can follow the light of the world
1:01:16
Speaker 1: is some one who walks ahead of you in the dark.
1:01:19
Speaker 1: The argument that follows is dense and intense. He says,
1:01:23
Speaker 1: you are from below, I am from above. You are
1:01:27
Speaker 1: of this world. I am not of this world. And
1:01:31
Speaker 1: then the statement that produces the most explosive reaction, Yet
1:01:35
Speaker 1: before Abraham was I am not. Before Abraham was, I
1:01:40
Speaker 1: was not. I existed before Abraham, before Abraham was born.
1:01:45
Speaker 1: I am present, tense, placed in the deep past, yet
1:01:50
Speaker 1: spoken in the present, the one who is before anything
1:01:54
Speaker 1: else was. They pick up stones to throw at him.
1:01:58
Speaker 1: He slips away through the crowd because his hour has
1:02:01
Speaker 1: not yet come, but it is coming. Everything in this
1:02:05
Speaker 1: gospel is moving toward that hour, the way a river
1:02:09
Speaker 1: moves toward the sea. Through every teaching and every sign
1:02:13
Speaker 1: and every I Am statement, all of it flowing toward
1:02:16
Speaker 1: the same place, the Bread of life, the light of
1:02:20
Speaker 1: the world. Two of the seven five more to come,
1:02:24
Speaker 1: each one a different angle on the same face, cut
1:02:27
Speaker 1: so that the light catches it differently, so that you
1:02:30
Speaker 1: can see something you could not see from where you
1:02:32
Speaker 1: were standing before. James has stopped thinking about the things
1:02:36
Speaker 1: that were keeping him awake. He does not know exactly
1:02:39
Speaker 1: when that happened. He is somewhere in the territory between
1:02:42
Speaker 1: waking and sleep, where the mind loosens its grip and
1:02:46
Speaker 1: something else becomes possible. The bread, the light. He is
1:02:51
Speaker 1: not hungry the way he was an hour ago. Let
1:02:54
Speaker 1: those two images stay with you in the dark to night,
1:02:57
Speaker 1: the bread that does not run out, the night that
1:03:00
Speaker 1: walks ahead of you. You do not need to understand
1:03:03
Speaker 1: everything they mean tonight. You only need to be here,
1:03:08
Speaker 1: still breathing. The river is flowing, the bread is on
1:03:13
Speaker 1: the table, the light is on, and the darkness, as
1:03:17
Speaker 1: the prolog promised from its very first pages, has not
1:03:20
Speaker 1: overcome it. Chapter six, The Man born blind. One morning
1:03:28
Speaker 1: in Jerusalem, the Disciples ask a question. They are passing
1:03:32
Speaker 1: a man who has been blind since the day he
1:03:35
Speaker 1: was born, and they ask Jesus, Rabbi, who sinned this
1:03:40
Speaker 1: man or his parents that he was born blind. The
1:03:44
Speaker 1: question reveals the theological framework they are working inside. Suffering
1:03:49
Speaker 1: must have a cause, specifically a moral cause. Someone must
1:03:54
Speaker 1: be responsible. The question is not cruel, It is the
1:03:58
Speaker 1: sincere attempt of sins sere people to make suffering makes
1:04:02
Speaker 1: sense inside a system that insists it must make sense.
1:04:07
Speaker 1: Jesus refuses the system entirely. It was not that this
1:04:11
Speaker 1: man sinned or his parents, but that the works of
1:04:14
Speaker 1: God might be displayed in him. He does not answer
1:04:18
Speaker 1: the why with a moral explanation. He answers it with
1:04:21
Speaker 1: a purpose, not punishment, not consequence, an opening, a place
1:04:28
Speaker 1: where something true can become visible. And then he does
1:04:32
Speaker 1: something that is of all the acts recorded in this gospel,
1:04:35
Speaker 1: the most physically strange. He spits on the ground. He
1:04:39
Speaker 1: makes mud with the saliva. He spreads the mud on
1:04:43
Speaker 1: the man's eyes. He tells him to go wash in
1:04:46
Speaker 1: the pool of Siloam. Of all the ways healing occurs
1:04:49
Speaker 1: in this gospel, this is the most elaborate. At Cana,
1:04:53
Speaker 1: the water transformed without him touching it. At Bethesda, he spoke,
1:04:57
Speaker 1: and the man walked. Here he may makes mud with
1:05:00
Speaker 1: his hands and puts it on a man's face. Why mud,
1:05:04
Speaker 1: The gospel does not explain. But the writer has been
1:05:07
Speaker 1: placing images throughout this story with careful intention, and this
1:05:12
Speaker 1: one reaches back to something much older. In the second
1:05:15
Speaker 1: chapter of Genesis, God forms the man from the dust
1:05:18
Speaker 1: of the ground. The Hebrew word for man is Adam,
1:05:22
Speaker 1: and the word for ground is Adama. The creator who
1:05:25
Speaker 1: shaped human life from the earth is now in the
1:05:28
Speaker 1: mud of a Jerusalem street, doing something that carries the
1:05:31
Speaker 1: memory of that original act, reshaping what was formed incomplete.
1:05:37
Speaker 1: The man goes to Siloam, he washes, he comes back
1:05:41
Speaker 1: seeing What happens next. Is one of the most carefully
1:05:45
Speaker 1: constructed sequences in the entire Gospel. The writer builds it
1:05:49
Speaker 1: like a court room drama, scene by scene, witness by witness,
1:05:55
Speaker 1: the tension rising with each exchange, the irony deepening with
1:05:59
Speaker 1: every line. The neighbors see the man who had been
1:06:02
Speaker 1: sitting and begging. They are not sure it is him.
1:06:06
Speaker 1: It looks like him. Can it be him? He says,
1:06:10
Speaker 1: I am the one. How were your eyes opened? He
1:06:15
Speaker 1: tells them, A man called Jesus made mud and put
1:06:18
Speaker 1: it on my eyes and told me to go wash.
1:06:21
Speaker 1: I went and washed and received my sight. Where is he?
1:06:25
Speaker 1: I do not know. They bring him to the Pharisees.
1:06:29
Speaker 1: The Pharisees ask how he received his sight. He tells them,
1:06:34
Speaker 1: Jesus made mud and put it on my eyes, and
1:06:36
Speaker 1: I washed, and I see. The Pharisees are immediately divided.
1:06:41
Speaker 1: Some say this man is not from God, for he
1:06:44
Speaker 1: does not keep the Sabbath. Others say, how can a
1:06:48
Speaker 1: man who is a sinner? Do such signs? They asked
1:06:51
Speaker 1: the man, what do you say about him? Since he
1:06:54
Speaker 1: opened your eyes? He says he is a prophet. The
1:06:58
Speaker 1: leaders do not accept this. They decide to investigate further.
1:07:03
Speaker 1: They call the parents, is this your son? Do you
1:07:07
Speaker 1: say that he was born blind? How does he now see?
1:07:11
Speaker 1: The parents confirm what they can confirm. This is our son,
1:07:15
Speaker 1: he was born blind. Beyond that, they will not go
1:07:19
Speaker 1: he is of age. Ask him he will speak for himself.
1:07:23
Speaker 1: The Gospel tells us why they answered this way. The
1:07:26
Speaker 1: Jewish leaders had already agreed that if any one confessed
1:07:30
Speaker 1: Jesus to be the Christ, he would be put out
1:07:32
Speaker 1: of the synagogue. To be excluded from the synagogue in
1:07:35
Speaker 1: the first century was not merely a religious consequence. It
1:07:39
Speaker 1: was social and economic exclusion from the community that structured
1:07:43
Speaker 1: every aspect of daily life. The parents understood the risk.
1:07:47
Speaker 1: They stepped back from it. So the leaders call the
1:07:51
Speaker 1: man a second time. Give glory to God. We know
1:07:55
Speaker 1: that this man is a sinner. The man says, whether
1:07:59
Speaker 1: he is a sinner, I do not know one thing.
1:08:02
Speaker 1: I do know I was blind. Now I see that
1:08:06
Speaker 1: sentence has survived two thousand years because it is the
1:08:10
Speaker 1: most unassailable form of testimony available to a human being.
1:08:14
Speaker 1: Not a theological argument, not a scriptural proof, a personal fact.
1:08:20
Speaker 1: I was blind. Now I see. You can argue with
1:08:24
Speaker 1: my interpretation, you cannot argue with my experience. They press
1:08:29
Speaker 1: him further. What did he do to you? How did
1:08:32
Speaker 1: he open your eyes? And here the man's patience runs out.
1:08:37
Speaker 1: Or perhaps it is not impatience. Perhaps it is the
1:08:40
Speaker 1: particular clarity that comes when a person has been through
1:08:44
Speaker 1: something significant enough that they are no longer afraid of
1:08:47
Speaker 1: the people asking the questions. He says, I have told
1:08:51
Speaker 1: you already and you did not listen. Why do you
1:08:54
Speaker 1: want to hear it again? Do you also want to
1:08:57
Speaker 1: become his disciples? They re him, you are his disciple,
1:09:02
Speaker 1: But we are disciples of Moses. We know that God
1:09:06
Speaker 1: has spoken to Moses. But as for this man, we
1:09:10
Speaker 1: do not know where he comes from. And the man,
1:09:13
Speaker 1: the beggar, the one born blind, the one who sat
1:09:16
Speaker 1: on the ground outside the temple and was given mud
1:09:18
Speaker 1: and sent to wash says something that in its context
1:09:22
Speaker 1: is remarkable. Why this is an amazing thing. You do
1:09:27
Speaker 1: not know where he comes from, and yet he opened
1:09:30
Speaker 1: my eyes? We know that God does not listen to sinners.
1:09:34
Speaker 1: But if anyone is a worshiper of God and does
1:09:36
Speaker 1: his will, God listens to him. Never since the world
1:09:40
Speaker 1: began has it been heard that any one opened the
1:09:42
Speaker 1: eyes of a man born blind. If this man were
1:09:46
Speaker 1: not from God, he could do nothing. He is not
1:09:49
Speaker 1: a scholar. He has not studied theology. He has spent
1:09:53
Speaker 1: his life sitting on the ground outside the temple, listening
1:09:57
Speaker 1: to the world go by without seeing it. And he
1:10:00
Speaker 1: he has just followed the logic further than the Pharisees
1:10:03
Speaker 1: are willing to go. He has used their own theological
1:10:06
Speaker 1: framework and arrived at a conclusion they refuse to accept.
1:10:10
Speaker 1: They cannot answer him, so they expel him. You were
1:10:14
Speaker 1: born in utter sin, you are teaching us, and they
1:10:19
Speaker 1: cast him out. Now consider what follows, and consider it slowly.
1:10:24
Speaker 1: Jesus heard that they had cast him out, and having
1:10:27
Speaker 1: found him, he said, do you believe in the son
1:10:30
Speaker 1: of Man? He heard, and he went looking. This is
1:10:35
Speaker 1: the sequence the Gospel records. The man was thrown out
1:10:38
Speaker 1: by the institution that had defined the boundaries of his
1:10:42
Speaker 1: entire world, and Jesus goes to find him. Not the
1:10:46
Speaker 1: other way around. The one with all the authority in
1:10:49
Speaker 1: this story goes looking for the one who was thrown away.
1:10:53
Speaker 1: There is a man named David. He is forty four
1:10:56
Speaker 1: years old and he lives outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. He
1:11:00
Speaker 1: left his church six years ago after a conflict. He
1:11:03
Speaker 1: still has difficulty explaining without the explanation, sounding smaller than
1:11:07
Speaker 1: the wound. He has not found another place, he tells himself.
1:11:12
Speaker 1: He is looking, but mostly he is carrying something. He
1:11:15
Speaker 1: does not know what to do with, the particular weight
1:11:18
Speaker 1: of someone who was cast out by a community that
1:11:21
Speaker 1: was supposed to be something better than that. He is
1:11:24
Speaker 1: listening to night because a friend sent him this video,
1:11:27
Speaker 1: and he trusts that friend more than he currently trusts
1:11:30
Speaker 1: most things. He does not know yet that the sequence
1:11:33
Speaker 1: he is about to hear thrown out then found was
1:11:36
Speaker 1: preserved in a gospel for exactly this kind of night.
1:11:39
Speaker 1: The man asks, who is he, Sir, that I may
1:11:43
Speaker 1: believe in him. Jesus says, you have seen him, and
1:11:47
Speaker 1: it is he who is speaking to you. He says, Lord,
1:11:51
Speaker 1: I believe, and he worships him. The man who could
1:11:55
Speaker 1: not see anything. At the beginning of this chapter, the
1:11:59
Speaker 1: man cast out by the people who were supposed to
1:12:01
Speaker 1: represent God, the man whose own parents step back from
1:12:05
Speaker 1: him to protect themselves. He ends this story having seen clearly,
1:12:09
Speaker 1: having been found by the one who went looking and
1:12:13
Speaker 1: worshiping him in the open, and Jesus says, for judgment,
1:12:17
Speaker 1: I came into this world that those who do not
1:12:20
Speaker 1: see may see, and those who see may become blind.
1:12:24
Speaker 1: The Pharisees who are present understand this is aimed at them.
1:12:27
Speaker 1: Are we also blind? Jesus says, if you were blind,
1:12:32
Speaker 1: you would have no guilt, But now that you say,
1:12:35
Speaker 1: we see, your guilt remains. Sight and blindness run through
1:12:40
Speaker 1: this entire chapter as a single sustained image. The man
1:12:44
Speaker 1: was physically blind and receives physical sight. The leaders have
1:12:48
Speaker 1: physical sight and are revealed as unable to see what
1:12:51
Speaker 1: is right in front of them. The irony is complete
1:12:54
Speaker 1: and deliberate. The ones who conducted three separate interrogations and
1:12:59
Speaker 1: gathered every piece of available evidence chose not to see.
1:13:03
Speaker 1: And the one who had never seen anything in his
1:13:05
Speaker 1: life saw clearly from the first moment his eyes were opened.
1:13:09
Speaker 1: Now Jesus stands in Jerusalem and speaks about what has
1:13:12
Speaker 1: just happened. He uses the image of a shepherd and sheep.
1:13:17
Speaker 1: I am the door of the sheep. If any one
1:13:19
Speaker 1: enters by me, he will be saved and will go
1:13:22
Speaker 1: in and out and find pasture. The third I am statement.
1:13:27
Speaker 1: I am the door, not a philosophy or a requirement,
1:13:32
Speaker 1: a threshold through which you pass to find what is
1:13:35
Speaker 1: on the other side. And then the fourth, I am
1:13:39
Speaker 1: the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life
1:13:42
Speaker 1: for the sheep. Good in Greek is callos. It carries
1:13:47
Speaker 1: the sense of beautiful, noble, excellent in its kind. The
1:13:51
Speaker 1: good shepherd is not merely competent. His goodness is visible
1:13:55
Speaker 1: in the quality of what he does, and what he
1:13:58
Speaker 1: does is laid down his life life. He is not
1:14:01
Speaker 1: describing a future plan. He is describing his nature. The
1:14:06
Speaker 1: hired hand runs when the wolf comes because the sheep
1:14:09
Speaker 1: do not belong to him. The good shepherd does not run.
1:14:13
Speaker 1: And then something that opens the image beyond anything his
1:14:16
Speaker 1: listeners expected. I have other sheep that are not of
1:14:19
Speaker 1: this fold. I must bring them also, and they will
1:14:23
Speaker 1: listen to my voice. So there will be one flock,
1:14:26
Speaker 1: one shepherd, other sheep not of this fold. The fold
1:14:31
Speaker 1: is Israel. The other sheep are every one else, every
1:14:35
Speaker 1: Samaritan woman at a well, every Greek who came to
1:14:39
Speaker 1: Jerusalem for a feast, every person in every century who
1:14:43
Speaker 1: would hear the voice of this shepherd in a language
1:14:45
Speaker 1: their ancestors had never spoken. David, listening in his car
1:14:50
Speaker 1: outside his apartment in Cincinnati, is one of those sheep.
1:14:54
Speaker 1: He was told he was not. He was told in
1:14:57
Speaker 1: ways that were sometimes explicit and sometimes only a replied
1:15:00
Speaker 1: that the fold had specific requirements and he had failed
1:15:04
Speaker 1: to meet them. He has been outside the door for
1:15:06
Speaker 1: six years. The door is still open. The shepherd has
1:15:10
Speaker 1: not stopped looking. One flock, one shepherd. It is winter
1:15:16
Speaker 1: now in Jerusalem, the feast of Dedication, celebrated in the
1:15:20
Speaker 1: darkest month of the year, the Festival of Light. The
1:15:24
Speaker 1: leaders surround Jesus in the colonnade of Solomon. How long
1:15:28
Speaker 1: will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ?
1:15:32
Speaker 1: Tell us plainly, Jesus says, I told you, and you
1:15:36
Speaker 1: do not believe the works that I do in my
1:15:39
Speaker 1: father's name. Bear witness about me. But you do not
1:15:43
Speaker 1: believe because you are not among my sheep. My sheep
1:15:47
Speaker 1: hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.
1:15:50
Speaker 1: I give them eternal life, and they will never perish.
1:15:54
Speaker 1: And then I and the Father are one. They pick
1:15:58
Speaker 1: up stones again. He escapes from their hands, and he
1:16:02
Speaker 1: goes away across the Jordan, back to the place where
1:16:06
Speaker 1: John the Baptist had first been baptizing, back to where
1:16:09
Speaker 1: this gospel began, at the river, with a voice pointing
1:16:13
Speaker 1: and saying, behold, many people come to him there. They say,
1:16:19
Speaker 1: John did no sign, but everything John said about this
1:16:22
Speaker 1: man was true, and many believed in him. There he
1:16:26
Speaker 1: is at the beginning again, back at the river, surrounded
1:16:29
Speaker 1: by people who are coming because the one who pointed
1:16:32
Speaker 1: told the truth. And it is there that the message arrives.
1:16:37
Speaker 1: A family in Bethany, two miles from Jerusalem, has sent
1:16:40
Speaker 1: word their brother is sick, and the gospel tells us
1:16:44
Speaker 1: in language it uses nowhere else, that Jesus loved this family,
1:16:49
Speaker 1: all three of them by name, with the specific personal
1:16:53
Speaker 1: love that knows a person rather than a category. The
1:16:56
Speaker 1: message is short, Lord, he whom you love is ill,
1:17:01
Speaker 1: no instruction, no explicit request, just the fact and the relationship,
1:17:07
Speaker 1: and the trust that the relationship is enough. David has
1:17:10
Speaker 1: not gone inside yet. He is still in his car,
1:17:13
Speaker 1: still listening something about what he just heard, thrown out,
1:17:18
Speaker 1: then found the door still open. The shepherd who goes
1:17:21
Speaker 1: looking is sitting in him in a place that has
1:17:24
Speaker 1: not been reached in six years. He is not ready
1:17:27
Speaker 1: to name it yet, but something has shifted. He will
1:17:31
Speaker 1: go inside soon, but not yet. The pool of Siloam
1:17:35
Speaker 1: is quiet to night. The mud has dried. The man
1:17:39
Speaker 1: who was born blind is somewhere in the city, seeing
1:17:42
Speaker 1: everything for the first time, learning the faces of people
1:17:45
Speaker 1: he has only ever known by their voices. He was
1:17:48
Speaker 1: cast out, he was found. You are not too far
1:17:51
Speaker 1: outside to be found. Chapter seven, Lazarus come out days.
1:18:01
Speaker 1: That is how long Lazarus has been in the tomb
1:18:03
Speaker 1: when Jesus finally arrives in Bethany. Not one day, not
1:18:08
Speaker 1: two four. The Gospel is precise about this number, and
1:18:13
Speaker 1: the precision matters. Jewish tradition in the first century held
1:18:17
Speaker 1: that the soul remained near the body for three days
1:18:20
Speaker 1: after death, with the possibility of return. By the fourth day,
1:18:24
Speaker 1: that possibility was considered closed, the soul had departed the
1:18:29
Speaker 1: body had begun to decay. Four days is beyond any
1:18:33
Speaker 1: ambiguity about whether Lazarus is truly dead. The message that
1:18:37
Speaker 1: reached Jesus across the Jordan said only this Lord, he
1:18:41
Speaker 1: whom you love, is ill. No instruction, no explicit request,
1:18:48
Speaker 1: just the fact and the relationship, and the trust that
1:18:50
Speaker 1: the relationship is enough. And Jesus, when he received the message,
1:18:55
Speaker 1: did something that has troubled careful readers ever since. He
1:18:58
Speaker 1: stayed where he was for two more days. He says
1:19:02
Speaker 1: to the disciples, this illness does not lead to death.
1:19:06
Speaker 1: It is for the glory of God. And then he
1:19:09
Speaker 1: waits two full days while Lazarus gets worse and then dies,
1:19:14
Speaker 1: and then lies in the tomb. This is not indifference.
1:19:18
Speaker 1: The gospel has already established that he loves Lazarus. He
1:19:22
Speaker 1: is about to show how deep that love goes. But
1:19:25
Speaker 1: first he waits, And the waiting is part of what
1:19:27
Speaker 1: he is doing, not a failure of response, a deliberate
1:19:32
Speaker 1: choice made from a knowledge of what is coming that
1:19:34
Speaker 1: no one else in the story yet possesses. After two days,
1:19:38
Speaker 1: he says, let us go to Judea again. The Disciples
1:19:43
Speaker 1: are immediately alarmed. The people there just tried to stone you.
1:19:47
Speaker 1: You want to go back. Jesus speaks about sleeping and waking.
1:19:52
Speaker 1: He uses the word sleep to mean death. The disciples
1:19:56
Speaker 1: misunderstand and think it means recovery. Jesus tells them plainly,
1:20:01
Speaker 1: Lazarus has died, and I am glad for your sake
1:20:06
Speaker 1: that I was not there, so that you may believe. Thomas,
1:20:09
Speaker 1: whose reputation has been shaped by a later chapter, says
1:20:13
Speaker 1: something worth hearing. Clearly, let us also go that we
1:20:17
Speaker 1: may die with him, not triumphant, not certain, but loyal.
1:20:23
Speaker 1: If he is going into danger, we are going with him.
1:20:26
Speaker 1: That is a kind of courage, even when it is
1:20:29
Speaker 1: shadowed by despair when they arrive. Many people from Jerusalem
1:20:33
Speaker 1: have come to be with Martha and Mary in their grief.
1:20:36
Speaker 1: When Martha hears that Jesus is coming, she goes out
1:20:39
Speaker 1: to meet him. Mary stays in the house. Martha says
1:20:43
Speaker 1: to him, Lord, if you had been here, my brother
1:20:47
Speaker 1: would not have died. That sentence carries the full weight
1:20:51
Speaker 1: of grief and faith held in the same breath. If
1:20:54
Speaker 1: you had been here four days of waiting, for days,
1:20:58
Speaker 1: of watching her brother die, and then burying him, and
1:21:01
Speaker 1: then sitting with the mourners while he still did not come,
1:21:04
Speaker 1: and then immediately But even now I know that whatever
1:21:08
Speaker 1: you ask from God, God will give you. She does
1:21:12
Speaker 1: not know what she is saying when she says, even
1:21:14
Speaker 1: now she is not hoping for a resurrection, she does
1:21:18
Speaker 1: not expect one. She is simply refusing to close the
1:21:21
Speaker 1: door entirely, even in the middle of her grief, even
1:21:25
Speaker 1: with four days of absence and death between her hope
1:21:28
Speaker 1: and her brother, Jesus says, your brother will rise again.
1:21:33
Speaker 1: She says, I know that he will rise again in
1:21:36
Speaker 1: the resurrection. On the last day. She gives the correct
1:21:40
Speaker 1: theological answer. The tradition she belongs to affirmed the resurrection
1:21:45
Speaker 1: of the dead at the end of history. She is
1:21:48
Speaker 1: placing her grief inside the correct framework. Yes, she knows
1:21:53
Speaker 1: one day at the end of all things, and Jesus says,
1:21:57
Speaker 1: I am the Resurrection and the Life. The fifth I
1:22:01
Speaker 1: am statement. And it arrives not in a temple or
1:22:04
Speaker 1: a discourse or a public debate. It arrives in a
1:22:08
Speaker 1: conversation with a grieving woman on a road outside a village,
1:22:11
Speaker 1: four days after her brother died. I am the Resurrection
1:22:16
Speaker 1: and the Life. Who ever believes in Me, though he die,
1:22:20
Speaker 1: yet shall he live. And every one who lives and
1:22:23
Speaker 1: believes in Me shall never die. He is not speaking
1:22:26
Speaker 1: about the last day. He is speaking about himself. The
1:22:30
Speaker 1: resurrection is not an event to be waited for at
1:22:33
Speaker 1: the end of history. The resurrection is a person standing
1:22:37
Speaker 1: on a road in Judea looking at a woman who
1:22:40
Speaker 1: has been waiting for him for four days. Do you
1:22:43
Speaker 1: believe this? Martha says, yes, Lord, I believe that you
1:22:48
Speaker 1: are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming
1:22:51
Speaker 1: into the world. It is one of the great confessions
1:22:54
Speaker 1: of faith in this gospel, given not in triumph, but
1:22:58
Speaker 1: in grief, spoken not in the temple, but on a
1:23:01
Speaker 1: dusty road by a woman who is still raw with loss,
1:23:05
Speaker 1: and who does not yet know that the one she
1:23:07
Speaker 1: is confessing is about to do something she cannot imagine.
1:23:11
Speaker 1: She goes back and calls Mary quietly. The teacher is
1:23:14
Speaker 1: here and is calling for you. Mary gets up quickly.
1:23:19
Speaker 1: The mourners in the house see her leave and follow her,
1:23:21
Speaker 1: assuming she is going to the tomb to weep. She
1:23:24
Speaker 1: falls at his feet. Lord, if you had been here,
1:23:28
Speaker 1: my brother would not have died. The same sentence, Martha said,
1:23:33
Speaker 1: the sentence they have both been carrying for four days,
1:23:36
Speaker 1: Grief and faith and accusation and trust, all pressed into
1:23:40
Speaker 1: the same words. When Jesus sees her weeping, and the
1:23:44
Speaker 1: mourners who came with her also weeping. The gospel records
1:23:48
Speaker 1: something that has stopped readers for twenty centuries. He was
1:23:52
Speaker 1: deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. The Greek
1:23:56
Speaker 1: word translated deeply moved is embri maumai. It is a
1:24:00
Speaker 1: strong word, carrying the sense of something stirring powerfully from within.
1:24:05
Speaker 1: Scholars have discussed this word for centuries without reaching agreement
1:24:08
Speaker 1: about exactly what it describes. Some see in it a
1:24:12
Speaker 1: response to death itself, to the gap between the world
1:24:15
Speaker 1: as it is and the world as it was made
1:24:17
Speaker 1: to be. Others see it as a response to the
1:24:20
Speaker 1: grief of the people he loves. The conversation among careful
1:24:24
Speaker 1: readers of this text has not ended, and perhaps that
1:24:28
Speaker 1: is fitting. What it describes resists simple categories. What follows
1:24:34
Speaker 1: is the shortest verse in the Gospel of John. Jesus
1:24:37
Speaker 1: wept two words in English, two words in Greek edacrusin iasis.
1:24:45
Speaker 1: He knows what he is about to do. He knows
1:24:47
Speaker 1: Lazarus is about to walk out of that tomb. He
1:24:50
Speaker 1: has waited, deliberately moved toward this moment with full knowledge
1:24:55
Speaker 1: of what it holds, and he still weeps because the
1:24:59
Speaker 1: people he loves are weeping, because the grief in front
1:25:02
Speaker 1: of him is real, even if it is about to
1:25:05
Speaker 1: be transformed. Because something in him, the part that pitched
1:25:09
Speaker 1: its tent among us and got tired from walking and
1:25:12
Speaker 1: sat at a well at noon, cannot encounter human grief
1:25:15
Speaker 1: without being moved by it. He weeps before the miracle
1:25:20
Speaker 1: in the middle of the loss, in the company of
1:25:23
Speaker 1: people who do not yet know what is about to happen.
1:25:27
Speaker 1: The mourners see him weeping and say, see how he
1:25:30
Speaker 1: loved him. Others say, could not he who opened the
1:25:34
Speaker 1: eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?
1:25:37
Speaker 1: The question is fair. It is the oldest question, dressed
1:25:40
Speaker 1: in specific clothes. If you love him, why did you
1:25:44
Speaker 1: let this happen? Spoken aloud by mourners who do not
1:25:47
Speaker 1: yet have an answer. Jesus, still deeply moved, comes to
1:25:51
Speaker 1: the tomb. It is a cave. A stone lies against it.
1:25:56
Speaker 1: He says, take away the stone. Arthur, practical and grieving,
1:26:01
Speaker 1: simultaneously says Lord. By this time there will be an odor,
1:26:06
Speaker 1: for he has been dead four days. Jesus says, did
1:26:10
Speaker 1: I not tell you that if you believed, you would
1:26:12
Speaker 1: see the glory of God? They take away the stone.
1:26:16
Speaker 1: Jesus lifts his eyes and prays a prayer of relationship,
1:26:21
Speaker 1: spoken aloud, not for himself, but for the people standing around. Father,
1:26:26
Speaker 1: I thank you that you have heard me. I know
1:26:28
Speaker 1: that you always hear me, but I said this on
1:26:31
Speaker 1: account of the people standing around that they may believe
1:26:34
Speaker 1: that you sent me. The prayer is for the watchers,
1:26:37
Speaker 1: for every one standing at that tomb in the afternoon sun,
1:26:41
Speaker 1: waiting to see what happens. And then he cries out
1:26:44
Speaker 1: with a loud voice, Lazarus come out, not a quiet word,
1:26:49
Speaker 1: not a murmur, a cry, that voice, in the full
1:26:54
Speaker 1: force of its authority, calling one specific man by his
1:26:57
Speaker 1: name from a tomb in Bethany. The dead man came out,
1:27:01
Speaker 1: his hands and feet bound with linen strips, his face
1:27:05
Speaker 1: wrapped with a cloth. He has come out, but he
1:27:08
Speaker 1: is still bound in the wrappings of burial. Jesus says,
1:27:12
Speaker 1: unbind him and let him go. The miracle does not
1:27:16
Speaker 1: leave Lazarus wrapped in death. The people standing around, the
1:27:20
Speaker 1: mourners who came to weep and instead witnessed something they
1:27:24
Speaker 1: had no category for, are given a roll unbind him,
1:27:28
Speaker 1: participate in the release. The resurrection opens the tomb, the
1:27:33
Speaker 1: community completes the work. The Gospel tells us what happened next,
1:27:37
Speaker 1: with its characteristic quiet directness. Many of the people who
1:27:41
Speaker 1: had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did
1:27:44
Speaker 1: believed in him. But some of them went to the
1:27:46
Speaker 1: Pharisees and told them what he had done. The same miracle,
1:27:51
Speaker 1: the same empty tomb, the same man walking out in
1:27:54
Speaker 1: grave clothes in the afternoon light, and the response divides.
1:28:00
Speaker 1: Unbelieve some report the chief priests and Pharisees gather the council.
1:28:06
Speaker 1: What are we to do? This man performs many signs.
1:28:10
Speaker 1: If we let him go on like this, every one
1:28:12
Speaker 1: will believe in him. The high priest Caiaphas says, it
1:28:16
Speaker 1: is better for you that one man should die for
1:28:19
Speaker 1: the people, not that the whole nation should perish. The
1:28:22
Speaker 1: Gospel adds a note that transforms this cynical political calculation
1:28:27
Speaker 1: into something else Entirely. He did not say this of
1:28:30
Speaker 1: his own accord, but being high priest that year, he
1:28:33
Speaker 1: prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation and not
1:28:36
Speaker 1: for the nation. Only, but also to gather into one
1:28:38
Speaker 1: the children of God who are scattered abroad. Caiaphas was
1:28:42
Speaker 1: protecting his position. He was calculating the value of one
1:28:46
Speaker 1: life against the stability of a nation. He was being
1:28:50
Speaker 1: ruthless and practical and entirely focused on the immediate. And
1:28:54
Speaker 1: he was, without knowing it, describing the entire meaning of
1:28:58
Speaker 1: what was coming. From that day, they made plans to
1:29:01
Speaker 1: put him to death. The miracle that brought Lazarus out
1:29:04
Speaker 1: of the tombs set in motion the events that would
1:29:07
Speaker 1: put Jesus into One love did this, the love that
1:29:11
Speaker 1: waited two days, The love that wept at a tomb
1:29:14
Speaker 1: it was about to open. The love that called a
1:29:17
Speaker 1: dead man by name in a loud voice and told
1:29:20
Speaker 1: the people standing around to unbind him and let him go.
1:29:24
Speaker 1: That love walked directly from the tomb of Lazarus into
1:29:28
Speaker 1: the trap closing around him in Jerusalem. And it did
1:29:31
Speaker 1: not turn aside, because the good shepherd does not run
1:29:34
Speaker 1: when the wolf comes. Six days before the Passover, Jesus
1:29:38
Speaker 1: comes to Bethany again. The family is together. Martha serves,
1:29:44
Speaker 1: Lazarus is at the table, He who was dead, is
1:29:47
Speaker 1: eating dinner, and Mary takes a pound of expensive ointment
1:29:51
Speaker 1: made from pure nard, and anoints the feet of Jesus
1:29:54
Speaker 1: and wipes his feet with her hair. The house is
1:29:57
Speaker 1: filled with the fragrance. The pound of pure nard was
1:30:01
Speaker 1: worth approximately three hundred dinari. One denarius was a day's
1:30:05
Speaker 1: wage for a laborer. Three hundred dinari was close to
1:30:09
Speaker 1: a year's salary. Mary pours it out all of it
1:30:13
Speaker 1: on his feet. Judas subjects why was this ointment not
1:30:18
Speaker 1: sold and given to the poor. The gospel tells us
1:30:21
Speaker 1: what Judas was actually concerned about. He kept the money
1:30:25
Speaker 1: bag and used to help himself to what was put
1:30:27
Speaker 1: in it. His concern for the poor was not concern
1:30:30
Speaker 1: for the poor. Jesus says, leave her alone. She has
1:30:35
Speaker 1: done this for the day of my burial. For the
1:30:38
Speaker 1: poor you always have with you, but you do not
1:30:40
Speaker 1: always have me. He is sitting at a table with
1:30:44
Speaker 1: a man he raised from the dead and a woman
1:30:46
Speaker 1: who has just poured a year's wages on his feet,
1:30:49
Speaker 1: and he is speaking about his burial. The next day,
1:30:53
Speaker 1: Jesus enters Jerusalem. Paum brunch crowds Hosanna, blessed is he
1:31:00
Speaker 1: who comes in the name of the Lord. And then
1:31:03
Speaker 1: something small and extraordinary happens in the middle of the noise.
1:31:07
Speaker 1: Some Greeks come to Philip Gentiles people from outside the
1:31:13
Speaker 1: Covenant entirely. They say, we wish to see Jesus. Philip
1:31:18
Speaker 1: tells Andrew. Andrew and Philip tell Jesus, and Jesus says,
1:31:23
Speaker 1: the hour has come for the son of Man to
1:31:25
Speaker 1: be glorified. The hour the word he has been measuring
1:31:30
Speaker 1: time by since the wedding at Cana. The other sheep
1:31:33
Speaker 1: not of this fold, have arrived at the door, and
1:31:36
Speaker 1: their arrival marks the beginning of the hour. He says,
1:31:40
Speaker 1: unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,
1:31:44
Speaker 1: it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.
1:31:49
Speaker 1: The hour of glorification is the hour of death. In
1:31:52
Speaker 1: this gospel, these are not opposites. They are the same event,
1:31:57
Speaker 1: seen from two different angles. Father, glorify your name. A
1:32:01
Speaker 1: voice comes from heaven. I have glorified it, and I
1:32:05
Speaker 1: will glorify it again. Some say it thundered, others say
1:32:11
Speaker 1: an angel spoke. Jesus says, this voice has come for
1:32:15
Speaker 1: your sake, not mine, and I, when I am lifted
1:32:19
Speaker 1: up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.
1:32:22
Speaker 1: All people, the Samaritan woman and the man born blind,
1:32:26
Speaker 1: and Nicodemus in the dark, and the Greeks at the door,
1:32:30
Speaker 1: and David in Cincinnati, and Anna in Portland, and James
1:32:34
Speaker 1: in Knoxville, and you, wherever you are, in whatever quiet room,
1:32:39
Speaker 1: in whatever season of your life, all people. I will
1:32:43
Speaker 1: draw all people to myself. Lazarus is alive in Bethany,
1:32:48
Speaker 1: eating dinner, his grave clothes left behind in the dark
1:32:52
Speaker 1: of a tomb that could not hold him. Chapter eight,
1:32:58
Speaker 1: The Last Night. Thirteen people are in a room in Jerusalem.
1:33:03
Speaker 1: It is an upper room reached by an outside staircase.
1:33:06
Speaker 1: The lamps are lit, the passover meal is on the table. Outside.
1:33:11
Speaker 1: The city holds the particular noise of a feast night,
1:33:14
Speaker 1: pilgrims and lanterns, and the low murmur of a thousand conversations.
1:33:19
Speaker 1: Inside this room, one of the thirteen knows it is
1:33:22
Speaker 1: the last night, not the last night of everything, the
1:33:26
Speaker 1: last night of this of the three years of walking
1:33:29
Speaker 1: and talking and eating together, of questions asked on hillsides
1:33:33
Speaker 1: and answers given beside lakes, of storms calmed and bread multiplied,
1:33:38
Speaker 1: and blind men sent to wash in pools, The last
1:33:42
Speaker 1: night of the particular kind of presents that has defined
1:33:45
Speaker 1: every day since the Jordan River, since the first disciples
1:33:49
Speaker 1: left their nets and followed. The Gospel makes this explicit
1:33:53
Speaker 1: at the very beginning of the chapter, in a sentence
1:33:56
Speaker 1: that carries the weight of everything that is coming now
1:33:59
Speaker 1: before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that
1:34:02
Speaker 1: his hour had come to depart out of this world
1:34:05
Speaker 1: to the Father. Having loved his own who were in
1:34:07
Speaker 1: the world, he loved them to the end. He loved
1:34:10
Speaker 1: them to the end. The Greek phrase is is telos.
1:34:15
Speaker 1: It means completely, utterly, to the fullest possible extent, and
1:34:20
Speaker 1: it also means to the finish, all the way through
1:34:23
Speaker 1: to the final point. Both meanings are present at once.
1:34:28
Speaker 1: He loved them completely. He loved them all the way
1:34:31
Speaker 1: to the very end of everything. That is the sentence
1:34:34
Speaker 1: placed at the entrance to this night, before a single
1:34:37
Speaker 1: word is spoken or a single action taken, Before the
1:34:41
Speaker 1: foot washing and the bread, and the long discourse and
1:34:43
Speaker 1: the garden, before all of it, the Gospel tells you
1:34:47
Speaker 1: what the whole night is made of love to the end.
1:34:52
Speaker 1: Before the meal begins, before anyone has spoken, Jesus gets
1:34:56
Speaker 1: up from the table, he lays aside his outer garment.
1:35:00
Speaker 1: He ties a towel around his waist. He pours water
1:35:04
Speaker 1: into a basin, and he begins to wash the feet
1:35:07
Speaker 1: of his disciples. In the world of the first century,
1:35:11
Speaker 1: foot washing was real work. The roads of Palestine were
1:35:14
Speaker 1: not paved. People walked everywhere in sandals, through dust and
1:35:19
Speaker 1: mud and everything a first century road collected. By the
1:35:23
Speaker 1: time a traveler arrived for a meal, their feet were
1:35:26
Speaker 1: genuinely dirty. It was also explicitly the work of the
1:35:30
Speaker 1: lowest servant in a household. A Jewish disciple was not
1:35:34
Speaker 1: expected to wash the feet of his own teacher, because
1:35:37
Speaker 1: even a disciple had more dignity than that task. Implied
1:35:41
Speaker 1: foot washing was for those at the absolute bottom of
1:35:44
Speaker 1: the social order. Jesus wraps a towel around his waist
1:35:48
Speaker 1: and kneels on the floor and washes the feet of
1:35:50
Speaker 1: his disciples. He comes to Simon Peter. Peter will not
1:35:55
Speaker 1: have it. Lord, Do you wash my feet? Jesus says,
1:36:00
Speaker 1: what I am doing. You do not understand now, but
1:36:03
Speaker 1: afterward you will understand. Peter says, you shall never wash
1:36:08
Speaker 1: my feet. Jesus says, if I do not wash you,
1:36:12
Speaker 1: you have no share with me. Peter overcorrects. Immediately, Lord,
1:36:17
Speaker 1: not my feet only, but also my hands and my head,
1:36:21
Speaker 1: Jesus says. The one who has bathed does not need
1:36:25
Speaker 1: to wash except for his feet, but is completely clean.
1:36:29
Speaker 1: He finishes, puts his outer garments back on, and returns
1:36:32
Speaker 1: to his place. Do you understand what I have done
1:36:36
Speaker 1: to you? You call me teacher and lord, and you
1:36:39
Speaker 1: are right, for so I am. If I, then your
1:36:43
Speaker 1: lord and teacher have washed your feet, you also ought
1:36:46
Speaker 1: to wash one another's feet. For I have given you
1:36:49
Speaker 1: an example that you also should do, just as I
1:36:52
Speaker 1: have done to you, an example, a pattern to follow.
1:36:57
Speaker 1: He has not done this to impress them. He has
1:37:00
Speaker 1: done it to show them what love looks like when
1:37:02
Speaker 1: it takes its hands out of its pockets and kneels
1:37:05
Speaker 1: on the floor. The teacher who washed feet, the lord
1:37:09
Speaker 1: who tied a towel around his waist. This is what
1:37:12
Speaker 1: authority looks like in the kingdom, he has been describing
1:37:15
Speaker 1: for three years. Not the authority of the Roman governor,
1:37:19
Speaker 1: who can send soldiers wherever he wishes. Not the authority
1:37:23
Speaker 1: of the high priest who controls access to the temple,
1:37:26
Speaker 1: the authority that gets on its knees and washes the
1:37:29
Speaker 1: feet of the people it loves. Now the night grows darker.
1:37:34
Speaker 1: Jesus says, truly, truly, I say to you, one of
1:37:38
Speaker 1: you will betray me. The disciples look at one another.
1:37:42
Speaker 1: The Beloved Disciple, leaning close to Jesus at the table,
1:37:46
Speaker 1: is asked by Peter tell Us who it is he
1:37:49
Speaker 1: is speaking about. The beloved Disciple asks Jesus quietly. Jesus says,
1:37:55
Speaker 1: it is he to whom I will give this morsel
1:37:57
Speaker 1: of bread. When I have dipped it hips the bread,
1:38:01
Speaker 1: he gives it to Judas Iscariot, And after he had
1:38:04
Speaker 1: taken the morsel, Satan entered into him. Jesus says, what
1:38:09
Speaker 1: you are going to do, do quickly. No one at
1:38:13
Speaker 1: the table understands what is happening. Judas takes the bread,
1:38:17
Speaker 1: he goes out, and then the Gospel records three words
1:38:21
Speaker 1: that function as the darkest sentence in the story, And
1:38:24
Speaker 1: it was night, a simple statement of the time. But
1:38:28
Speaker 1: the writer, who has been building the image of light
1:38:31
Speaker 1: and darkness from the very first sentence of his prologue,
1:38:34
Speaker 1: does not use those three words. By accident. Judas goes
1:38:38
Speaker 1: out of the light of that room and into the
1:38:40
Speaker 1: darkness that has been gathering since the beginning. It was night.
1:38:44
Speaker 1: But something shifts the moment Judas leaves, something opens up.
1:38:49
Speaker 1: Jesus begins to speak with a freedom and intimacy that
1:38:52
Speaker 1: the presence of Judas must have constrained. He says, now
1:38:57
Speaker 1: is the son of Man glorified, and God is glorified
1:39:01
Speaker 1: in him. Now the moment Judas walked out the door,
1:39:05
Speaker 1: the machinery of the cross is in motion, and Jesus
1:39:09
Speaker 1: calls it glory, little children, Yet a little while I
1:39:13
Speaker 1: am with you, little children Technia. The only time in
1:39:17
Speaker 1: the Gospel Jesus uses this address tender in a way
1:39:21
Speaker 1: none of his other addresses have been. These particular frightened
1:39:25
Speaker 1: and confused and loyal people sitting around a table in
1:39:28
Speaker 1: Jerusalem are his little children in this moment, and he
1:39:32
Speaker 1: is about to leave them. He gives them a new commandment.
1:39:36
Speaker 1: A new commandment I give to you that you love
1:39:39
Speaker 1: one another just as I have loved you. You also
1:39:42
Speaker 1: are to love one another. By this, all people will
1:39:45
Speaker 1: know that you are my disciples. If you have love
1:39:48
Speaker 1: for one another just as I have loved you, not
1:39:52
Speaker 1: love one another according to your own best capacity. Not
1:39:56
Speaker 1: love one another when it is convenient or safe. Love
1:40:00
Speaker 1: on another as I have loved you, with towels and
1:40:03
Speaker 1: basins on your knees to the end. Peter asks, Lord,
1:40:09
Speaker 1: where are you going? Jesus says, where I am going.
1:40:13
Speaker 1: You cannot follow me now, but you will follow afterward.
1:40:17
Speaker 1: Peter says, Lord, why can I not follow you? Now?
1:40:21
Speaker 1: I will lay down my life for you, Jesus says,
1:40:25
Speaker 1: will you lay down your life for me? Truly? Truly,
1:40:29
Speaker 1: I say to you, the rooster will not crow till
1:40:31
Speaker 1: you have denied me three times. The prediction lands in
1:40:35
Speaker 1: the room like a stone dropped into still water. Peter,
1:40:39
Speaker 1: who has just declared his willingness to die for Jesus,
1:40:42
Speaker 1: is told that before morning he will deny knowing him
1:40:46
Speaker 1: three times. Peter has no answer for this, No one does,
1:40:51
Speaker 1: and Jesus, into the silence that follows, says, the sentence
1:40:55
Speaker 1: that has been spoken over more grief and fear and
1:40:58
Speaker 1: confusion than almost any other sentence in the world. Let
1:41:02
Speaker 1: not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, Believe also
1:41:07
Speaker 1: in Me. He has just told Peter that Peter will
1:41:10
Speaker 1: betray him. He has told them all that he is
1:41:13
Speaker 1: going somewhere they cannot follow. He has told them that
1:41:16
Speaker 1: one of them has already handed him over to those
1:41:19
Speaker 1: who want to kill him. And into all of that,
1:41:22
Speaker 1: into the specific and justified anxiety of eleven men in
1:41:26
Speaker 1: an upper room on the last night before everything changes,
1:41:29
Speaker 1: he says, let not your hearts be troubled. This is
1:41:33
Speaker 1: not easy comfort. This is not the comfort of some
1:41:36
Speaker 1: one who does not know what is coming. It is
1:41:39
Speaker 1: the comfort of some one who knows exactly what is
1:41:41
Speaker 1: coming and says it anyway. In my father's house are
1:41:45
Speaker 1: many rooms. If it were not so, would I have
1:41:48
Speaker 1: told you that I go to prepare a place for you.
1:41:51
Speaker 1: And if I go and prepare a place for you,
1:41:53
Speaker 1: I will come again and will take you to myself,
1:41:57
Speaker 1: that where I am you may be also many rooms.
1:42:01
Speaker 1: The Greek word is monigh, from the verb meno to remain,
1:42:05
Speaker 1: to stay, to abide, the same word used when he
1:42:09
Speaker 1: says abide in me. The rooms in the father's house
1:42:13
Speaker 1: are not temporary accommodations. They are places of belonging, permanent dwelling.
1:42:19
Speaker 1: He is going to prepare a place, and he will
1:42:22
Speaker 1: come back. Thomas says, Lord, we do not know where
1:42:26
Speaker 1: you are going? How can we know the way? And
1:42:30
Speaker 1: Jesus says, I am the Way and the Truth and
1:42:34
Speaker 1: the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
1:42:38
Speaker 1: The sixth I am statement, arriving in answer to a
1:42:42
Speaker 1: man who said he did not know the way, not
1:42:45
Speaker 1: in a lecture, in response to honest confusion. I am
1:42:49
Speaker 1: the way, not I will show you the way, not
1:42:53
Speaker 1: I will describe the way. I am it. The path
1:42:57
Speaker 1: and the destination are the same person. The truth is
1:43:00
Speaker 1: not a set of propositions, but a person you follow.
1:43:04
Speaker 1: The life is not a condition you achieve, but a
1:43:06
Speaker 1: relationship you enter. Philip says, Lord, show us the Father,
1:43:11
Speaker 1: and it is enough for us. Jesus says, have I
1:43:15
Speaker 1: been with you so long and you still do not
1:43:17
Speaker 1: know me? Philip, whoever has seen me, has seen the
1:43:21
Speaker 1: Father three years, three years of walking together, eating together,
1:43:26
Speaker 1: watching the signs, hearing the teaching, standing at the tomb
1:43:29
Speaker 1: of Lazarus, seeing the water turn to wine. And Philip
1:43:33
Speaker 1: is still asking to be shown the Father, as if
1:43:36
Speaker 1: the Father is somewhere else, as if looking at Jesus
1:43:40
Speaker 1: is not already looking at the Father. There is something
1:43:43
Speaker 1: in that response that is not impatience. It is closer
1:43:47
Speaker 1: to the tender sorrow of a teacher who has given
1:43:49
Speaker 1: everything and knows that what he has given is beyond
1:43:53
Speaker 1: what any human being can fully take in. During three
1:43:56
Speaker 1: years of walking on dusty roads. He speaks about the
1:44:00
Speaker 1: counselor the paraclet, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will
1:44:05
Speaker 1: send in his name. This is the one who will
1:44:07
Speaker 1: not leave them orphaned, the one who will be with
1:44:10
Speaker 1: them after he is gone, teaching them, reminding them, bearing
1:44:14
Speaker 1: witness alongside them. Peace. I leave with you my peace.
1:44:19
Speaker 1: I give to you. Not as the world gives, do
1:44:22
Speaker 1: I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled,
1:44:25
Speaker 1: neither let them be afraid. The peace of the world
1:44:29
Speaker 1: is the peace of the absence of conflict, the uneasy
1:44:32
Speaker 1: quiet between one crisis and the next. The peace he
1:44:35
Speaker 1: gives is of a different category. It does not depend
1:44:39
Speaker 1: on circumstances. It does not require the absence of trouble.
1:44:43
Speaker 1: It is the peace of knowing, at the deepest level
1:44:46
Speaker 1: that you are held by something circumstances cannot reach. Not
1:44:50
Speaker 1: as the world gives. What he gives does not expire.
1:44:54
Speaker 1: It does not require maintenance. It is given once completely
1:44:58
Speaker 1: to the end rise, let us go from here. But
1:45:03
Speaker 1: they do not go yet, because there is still more
1:45:06
Speaker 1: to say, and the night is holding space for it.
1:45:09
Speaker 1: Breathe for a moment. The upper room is still, the
1:45:13
Speaker 1: lamps are still burning. Outside. Jerusalem is unaware of what
1:45:18
Speaker 1: is being said in this room to night. This is
1:45:21
Speaker 1: the last night, and there is one more image to
1:45:24
Speaker 1: give before the garden. Jesus speaks about a vine. I
1:45:28
Speaker 1: am the true Vine, and my father is the vine dresser.
1:45:32
Speaker 1: The seventh and final I am statement, not spoken to
1:45:37
Speaker 1: a crowd or in a temple, or to interrogators, spoken
1:45:40
Speaker 1: in the dark on the last night, to the eleven
1:45:43
Speaker 1: who have stayed. I am the True Vine. In the
1:45:47
Speaker 1: Hebrew scriptures, the vine is Israel. Isaiah sang a song
1:45:51
Speaker 1: about a vineyard planted by God that produced wild grapes.
1:45:55
Speaker 1: The image was so deeply embedded in the tradition that
1:45:59
Speaker 1: a great golden vine decorated the entrance to the Temple
1:46:02
Speaker 1: in Jerusalem, the most visible symbol of Israel's identity as
1:46:07
Speaker 1: the people of God, and Jesus says, I am the
1:46:11
Speaker 1: True Vine, not a replacement of Israel, but its fulfillment,
1:46:16
Speaker 1: the one in whom everything Israel was called to be
1:46:19
Speaker 1: is finally and completely present. Abide in Me and I
1:46:23
Speaker 1: in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself
1:46:26
Speaker 1: unless it abides in the vine. Neither can you unless
1:46:30
Speaker 1: you abide in me, abide men, nor the Word running
1:46:35
Speaker 1: quietly through this gospel since chapter one, when the first
1:46:38
Speaker 1: disciples stayed with Jesus after asking where he was going,
1:46:42
Speaker 1: and he said, come and see, and they came, and
1:46:44
Speaker 1: they stayed. And now on the last night, it becomes
1:46:48
Speaker 1: the central instruction. Stay, remain, do not detach, do not
1:46:55
Speaker 1: try to bear fruit in isolation from the source of
1:46:57
Speaker 1: all fruit. The branch that is off withers. The branch
1:47:02
Speaker 1: that stays connected bears fruit, not by striving, by staying.
1:47:07
Speaker 1: If you abide in Me and my words, abide in you,
1:47:11
Speaker 1: ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.
1:47:14
Speaker 1: And then he says something that stops the room. These
1:47:17
Speaker 1: things I have spoken to you, that my joy may
1:47:20
Speaker 1: be in you, and that your joy may be full joy.
1:47:25
Speaker 1: In the middle of the last night, with Judas already
1:47:28
Speaker 1: in the dark, and the cross already in motion, and
1:47:31
Speaker 1: the arrest only ours away joy not despite what is coming,
1:47:36
Speaker 1: but inside it, the joy of the one who knows
1:47:39
Speaker 1: that love all the way to the end is the
1:47:41
Speaker 1: fullest thing a person can do with a life. Greater
1:47:44
Speaker 1: love has no one than this, that some one laid
1:47:47
Speaker 1: down his life for his friends. You are my friends,
1:47:52
Speaker 1: not servants friends. The relationship has traveled from following to belonging.
1:47:58
Speaker 1: He has told them everything he had heard from the Father.
1:48:01
Speaker 1: You did not choose me, but I chose you. He
1:48:04
Speaker 1: prepares them for what following him will cost. He does
1:48:08
Speaker 1: not minimize it. He does not promise an easy road.
1:48:11
Speaker 1: He tells them the world will hate them because it
1:48:14
Speaker 1: hated him first. That the hour is coming when whoever
1:48:17
Speaker 1: kills them will think he is serving God. But the
1:48:20
Speaker 1: counselor will come the spirit of truth. He will bear witness,
1:48:26
Speaker 1: and you also will bear witness, because you have been
1:48:29
Speaker 1: with me from the beginning. Now Jesus lifts his eyes
1:48:32
Speaker 1: to heaven and prays. This is chapter seventeen of the Gospel,
1:48:38
Speaker 1: the chapter that none of the other three gospels contains
1:48:41
Speaker 1: the full text of the prayer Jesus prayed on the
1:48:44
Speaker 1: Last Night, spoken aloud in the hearing of the disciples,
1:48:47
Speaker 1: presotoved in the testimony. This gospel carries across every century. Father,
1:48:53
Speaker 1: the hour has come, glorify your son, that the son
1:48:57
Speaker 1: may glorify you. He prays for them, the disciples, Holy Father,
1:49:02
Speaker 1: keep them in your name, that they may be one,
1:49:05
Speaker 1: even as we are one. While I was with them,
1:49:08
Speaker 1: I kept them in your name. I have guarded them,
1:49:11
Speaker 1: and not one of them has been lost, except the
1:49:13
Speaker 1: Son of Destruction. But now I am coming to you,
1:49:17
Speaker 1: and these things I speak in the world, that they
1:49:19
Speaker 1: may have my joy fulfilled in themselves. He is praying
1:49:23
Speaker 1: for their joy, and then the prayer opens beyond the room.
1:49:28
Speaker 1: I do not ask for these only, but also for
1:49:31
Speaker 1: those who will believe in me through their word. He
1:49:34
Speaker 1: is praying for every one who would hear this story
1:49:36
Speaker 1: and believe it through the testimony of those first witnesses.
1:49:40
Speaker 1: Every person who has ever listened to this gospel in
1:49:43
Speaker 1: the dark, every person who has ever read these words
1:49:46
Speaker 1: and felt something stir in them, is inside that prayer.
1:49:50
Speaker 1: Anna in Portland, lying in the dark with her lamps
1:49:53
Speaker 1: still on. James in Knoxville, somewhere between waking and sleep,
1:49:58
Speaker 1: David in Cincinnati, still in his car, still holding what
1:50:02
Speaker 1: he heard. And you, wherever you are, in whatever room,
1:50:06
Speaker 1: in whatever season of your life that brought you to
1:50:08
Speaker 1: this knight. All of you are inside that prayer prayed
1:50:12
Speaker 1: for before you were born, named in the love that
1:50:15
Speaker 1: existed before the foundation of the world, that they may
1:50:19
Speaker 1: all be one, just as you, Father are in me
1:50:22
Speaker 1: and I in you, that they also may be in us. Father,
1:50:26
Speaker 1: I desire that they, also, whom you have given me,
1:50:30
Speaker 1: may be with me where I am to see my
1:50:32
Speaker 1: glory that you have given me, because you loved me
1:50:35
Speaker 1: before the foundation of the world, Before the foundation of
1:50:39
Speaker 1: the world. The love between the Father and the son
1:50:42
Speaker 1: is older than creation. And the desire in that prayer
1:50:46
Speaker 1: is that the people in the upper room and every
1:50:48
Speaker 1: one who would come after them, would be where he is,
1:50:52
Speaker 1: participating in that love. I made known to them your name,
1:50:56
Speaker 1: and I will continue to make it known that the
1:50:58
Speaker 1: love with which you have loved me may be in them,
1:51:01
Speaker 1: and I in them, the love with which you loved
1:51:05
Speaker 1: me in them. The same love, the love that existed
1:51:09
Speaker 1: before the world was made, offered now to the people
1:51:12
Speaker 1: in that room and to every one who would come after.
1:51:15
Speaker 1: That is what the Last Night is for, not to
1:51:18
Speaker 1: describe a transaction, to extend a love that was older
1:51:22
Speaker 1: than the world into the world itself. To let eleaven
1:51:26
Speaker 1: tired and frightened and loyal people know that what is
1:51:28
Speaker 1: happening to them is not the collapse of everything they believed,
1:51:32
Speaker 1: but the beginning of what they were always meant to be.
1:51:34
Speaker 1: Part of the prayer ends. When Jesus had spoken these words,
1:51:40
Speaker 1: he went out with his disciples across the brook Kidron,
1:51:43
Speaker 1: where there was a garden, which he and his disciples entered.
1:51:46
Speaker 1: The room is empty now. The lamps are still burning.
1:51:50
Speaker 1: Somewhere in the city. Judas is moving through the dark
1:51:54
Speaker 1: with soldiers and lanterns behind him. And in the garden
1:51:58
Speaker 1: the hour that has been coming since the wedding at
1:52:00
Speaker 1: Cana is finally, fully, irreversibly. Here. You were inside that
1:52:05
Speaker 1: prayer to night. You have been inside it since before
1:52:08
Speaker 1: the foundation of the world. Let that settle into you
1:52:11
Speaker 1: the way water settles into dry ground, without effort, without urgency.
1:52:17
Speaker 1: The night is holding you, and the one who prayed
1:52:20
Speaker 1: that prayer has not for a single moment of your
1:52:22
Speaker 1: life turned away. Chapter nine. The Garden and the Cross
1:52:30
Speaker 1: a garden across the Kidron Valley from Jerusalem. The valley
1:52:34
Speaker 1: is shallow, a narrow seam between the eastern wall of
1:52:37
Speaker 1: the city and the slope of the Mount of Olives.
1:52:40
Speaker 1: The brook at the bottom runs dark. The garden on
1:52:44
Speaker 1: the far side is quiet and familiar. Jesus has been
1:52:47
Speaker 1: here before. The Gospel tells us he often met there
1:52:50
Speaker 1: with his disciples, a place of habit and return, a
1:52:55
Speaker 1: place where, in the ordinary course of those three years
1:52:58
Speaker 1: they had rested and talked and prayed. Judas knows it.
1:53:03
Speaker 1: That is why he brings the soldiers there. A band
1:53:06
Speaker 1: of soldiers and officers arrives, with lanterns and torches and weapons.
1:53:10
Speaker 1: They have come prepared for someone who might run. Jesus
1:53:14
Speaker 1: steps forward to meet them. Whom do you seek, they say,
1:53:18
Speaker 1: Jesus of Nazareth. He says, I am he egor amy,
1:53:25
Speaker 1: the two words that have been carrying a particular weight
1:53:27
Speaker 1: throughout this gospel, from the shore of the lake where
1:53:31
Speaker 1: he walked on water, to the temple courts where he
1:53:34
Speaker 1: spoke about light, and to the upper room where he
1:53:37
Speaker 1: called himself the way and the vine. Those two words
1:53:41
Speaker 1: spoken now in a garden at night, to an armed
1:53:43
Speaker 1: detachment with torches and weapons. When Jesus said to them,
1:53:47
Speaker 1: I am He, they drew back and fell to the
1:53:49
Speaker 1: ground armed soldiers carrying torches and weapons. They hear two words,
1:53:56
Speaker 1: and they fall. The gospel records this without elaboration. It
1:54:01
Speaker 1: was remembered because it happened. The one they have come
1:54:04
Speaker 1: to arrest is not arrested because he is overcome. He
1:54:08
Speaker 1: submits willingly. He could leave the garden at any moment.
1:54:12
Speaker 1: He stays because his hour has come, and he knows
1:54:15
Speaker 1: what his hour is for. He asks them again, home,
1:54:19
Speaker 1: do you seek Jesus of Nazareth? He says, I told
1:54:24
Speaker 1: you that I am He, So if you seek me,
1:54:28
Speaker 1: let these men go. Even in the moment of his
1:54:31
Speaker 1: own arrest, his first concern is for the people around him.
1:54:35
Speaker 1: Let these men go. Peter draws a sword. He swings
1:54:39
Speaker 1: it at the high priest's servant and cuts off his
1:54:42
Speaker 1: right ear. The servant's name is Malchus. Only this gospel
1:54:47
Speaker 1: records the name. Only. This gospel records that it was
1:54:50
Speaker 1: the right ear, the kind of detail that stays in
1:54:54
Speaker 1: the memory of someone who was standing close enough to see.
1:54:57
Speaker 1: Jesus says, put your sword in to its sheath. Shall
1:55:01
Speaker 1: I not drink the cup that the Father has given me?
1:55:04
Speaker 1: Not a prayer for the cup to be removed a
1:55:07
Speaker 1: question that already contains its own answer. Yes, he will
1:55:12
Speaker 1: drink it. He has always known he would. The whole
1:55:16
Speaker 1: Gospel has been moving toward this garden and this cup.
1:55:19
Speaker 1: They bind him, They lead him away. In the courtyard
1:55:23
Speaker 1: of the high Priest's house, a charcoal fire is burning.
1:55:27
Speaker 1: The servants and officers are warming themselves in the cold
1:55:30
Speaker 1: of the night. Peter stands among them. A servant girl
1:55:34
Speaker 1: looks at Peter and says, you also are not one
1:55:38
Speaker 1: of this man's disciples, are you? He says, I am
1:55:42
Speaker 1: not oak amy. I am not the precise grammatical opposite
1:55:48
Speaker 1: of ego amy. The man who walked on water toward Jesus,
1:55:52
Speaker 1: who declared you are the Holy One of God when
1:55:55
Speaker 1: others walked away, stands at a charcoal fire in a
1:55:58
Speaker 1: cold courtyard and says, I am not the charcoal fire.
1:56:02
Speaker 1: The Gospel uses a specific Greek word for this kind
1:56:06
Speaker 1: of fire, anthracia, fire made of coals. It appears only
1:56:11
Speaker 1: twice in the entire New Testament, once here at the
1:56:15
Speaker 1: Denial and once again at the shore of the lake
1:56:18
Speaker 1: at the Restoration. The writer who chose that word both
1:56:22
Speaker 1: times knew exactly what he was building toward across the
1:56:25
Speaker 1: chapters between them. Inside, Jesus is brought before the High
1:56:29
Speaker 1: Priest and questioned. He says, I have spoken openly to
1:56:33
Speaker 1: the world. I have always taught in synagogues and in
1:56:37
Speaker 1: the temple. I have said nothing in secret. Why do
1:56:40
Speaker 1: you ask me? Ask those who have heard me. One
1:56:44
Speaker 1: of the officers strikes him. Is that how you answer
1:56:47
Speaker 1: the High priest? Jesus says, if what I said is wrong,
1:56:52
Speaker 1: bear witness about the wrong. But if what I said
1:56:55
Speaker 1: is right, why do you strike me? He is sent
1:56:58
Speaker 1: to Caiaphas, and from Caiaphas to Pilot. The trial before
1:57:03
Speaker 1: Pilot is the most theatrically constructed scene in this gospel.
1:57:07
Speaker 1: The writer moves the action back and forth between inside
1:57:10
Speaker 1: the pretorium, where Pilot questions Jesus, and outside, where the
1:57:14
Speaker 1: crowd is gathered. Five exchanges back and forth, the tension
1:57:20
Speaker 1: rising with each one. Pilot caught between a truth he
1:57:23
Speaker 1: cannot quite deny and a pressure he does not have
1:57:26
Speaker 1: the courage to resist. The Jewish leaders will not enter
1:57:30
Speaker 1: the pretorium because entering a gentile building would make them
1:57:34
Speaker 1: ritually impure for the passover. There is something almost unbearable
1:57:39
Speaker 1: about this detail. They are preserving their ritual purity while
1:57:43
Speaker 1: arranging the death of an innocent man. Pilot goes out
1:57:47
Speaker 1: to them, what accusation do you bring against this man?
1:57:51
Speaker 1: They answer. He goes back inside. He questions, Jesus, are
1:57:56
Speaker 1: you the king of the Jews? Jesus asks, do you
1:58:00
Speaker 1: say this of your own accord? Or did others say
1:58:03
Speaker 1: it to you about me? Pilot says, am I a
1:58:07
Speaker 1: you your own nation, and the chief priests have delivered
1:58:11
Speaker 1: you over to me. What have you done? Jesus says,
1:58:15
Speaker 1: My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom
1:58:18
Speaker 1: were of this world, my servants would have been fighting.
1:58:22
Speaker 1: But my kingdom is not from the world. Pilot says,
1:58:26
Speaker 1: so you are a king, Jesus says, you say that
1:58:30
Speaker 1: I am a king. For this purpose I was born,
1:58:33
Speaker 1: and for this purpose I have come into the world
1:58:35
Speaker 1: to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of
1:58:39
Speaker 1: the truth listens to my voice. Pilot says, what is truth?
1:58:44
Speaker 1: He does not wait for an answer. He goes back outside.
1:58:48
Speaker 1: I find no guilt in him. Do you want me
1:58:51
Speaker 1: to release the king of the Jews? They cry out,
1:58:54
Speaker 1: not this man, but Barabbas Now Barabbas was a robbers.
1:59:00
Speaker 1: Jesus flogged the soldiers, weave a crown of thorns and
1:59:03
Speaker 1: put it on his head. They dress him in a
1:59:06
Speaker 1: purple robe. They strike him. Hail, King of the Jews.
1:59:11
Speaker 1: Pilot goes out again. I am bringing him out so
1:59:14
Speaker 1: that you may know that I find no guilt in him.
1:59:17
Speaker 1: Jesus comes out, wearing the crown of thorns and the
1:59:20
Speaker 1: purple robe. Pilot says, behold the man itch ormo, two
1:59:30
Speaker 1: words that have echoed through two thousand years of art
1:59:33
Speaker 1: and prayer and grief. Behold the man, the logos who
1:59:38
Speaker 1: was with God in the beginning, the one through whom
1:59:40
Speaker 1: all things were made, the one who turned water into wine,
1:59:44
Speaker 1: and sat at a well at noon and made mud
1:59:47
Speaker 1: with his hands, and called a dead man by name.
1:59:50
Speaker 1: Standing before a crowd that wants his death, wearing thorns
1:59:53
Speaker 1: and mockery, behold the man. Pilot says three times that
1:59:58
Speaker 1: he finds no guilt in him. Three times the crowd
2:00:01
Speaker 1: refuses to accept it. When Pilot hears that Jesus has
2:00:05
Speaker 1: made himself the son of God, the Gospel tells us,
2:00:08
Speaker 1: he was even more afraid. He goes back inside. Where
2:00:12
Speaker 1: are you from Jesus gives him no answer. Pilot says,
2:00:17
Speaker 1: you will not speak to me. Do you not know
2:00:19
Speaker 1: that I have authority to release you and authority to
2:00:23
Speaker 1: crucify you. Jesus says, you would have no authority over
2:00:27
Speaker 1: me at all unless it had been given you from above. Therefore,
2:00:31
Speaker 1: he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin.
2:00:34
Speaker 1: From that moment, the gospel says, Pilot sought to release him,
2:00:39
Speaker 1: but the crowd will not relent if you release this man.
2:00:43
Speaker 1: You are not Caesar's friend. Pilot knows he has lost.
2:00:47
Speaker 1: He brings Jesus out to the judgment seat. The chief
2:00:50
Speaker 1: priest's answer, we have no king but Caesar. The guardians
2:00:55
Speaker 1: of a tradition that proclaimed no king but God have
2:00:58
Speaker 1: just declared Caesar their king. In order to accomplish what
2:01:02
Speaker 1: they want, they have surrendered the central confession of their faith.
2:01:06
Speaker 1: Pilot delivers Jesus to be crucified. He went out, bearing
2:01:11
Speaker 1: his own cross to the place called the place of
2:01:13
Speaker 1: a skull in Aramaic Golgota. There they crucified him with
2:01:19
Speaker 1: two others, one on either side, and Jesus between them.
2:01:24
Speaker 1: Pilot wrote an inscription and put it on the cross
2:01:27
Speaker 1: Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews, written in Hebrew,
2:01:32
Speaker 1: in Latin, and in Greek, the three great languages of
2:01:36
Speaker 1: the known world. The chief priests object, do not write
2:01:40
Speaker 1: King of the Jews. Pilot says what I have written.
2:01:45
Speaker 1: I have written what Pilot meant as mockery becomes in
2:01:49
Speaker 1: this gospel proclamation. The inscription in three languages goes out
2:01:53
Speaker 1: to the whole world. The King is on his cross,
2:01:57
Speaker 1: standing by the cross of Jesus. Were his mother and
2:02:00
Speaker 1: his mother's sister, Mary, the wife of Clopus, and Mary Magdalene,
2:02:05
Speaker 1: and the Disciple, whom Jesus loved. The beloved Disciple is
2:02:09
Speaker 1: at the cross. He does not run, He stays. He
2:02:13
Speaker 1: sees everything, and decades later he writes it down. Jesus
2:02:18
Speaker 1: sees his mother and the beloved Disciple standing near. He
2:02:21
Speaker 1: says to his mother, woman, behold your son. He says
2:02:26
Speaker 1: to the Disciple, behold your mother. The first words from
2:02:31
Speaker 1: the cross in this gospel are an act of provision.
2:02:34
Speaker 1: He is dying. He is taking care of the people
2:02:37
Speaker 1: he loves. From that hour, the Disciple took her to
2:02:41
Speaker 1: his own home. After this, Jesus, knowing that all things
2:02:45
Speaker 1: were now finished, said I thirst. A jar full of
2:02:49
Speaker 1: sour wine stood there. They put a sponge full of
2:02:52
Speaker 1: the sour wine on a hissop branch and held it
2:02:55
Speaker 1: to his mouth. When Jesus had received the sour wine,
2:02:58
Speaker 1: he said, it is finished. Di de lestai a single
2:03:04
Speaker 1: word in Greek, the same route as the phrase used
2:03:07
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the Last night. He loved them
2:03:10
Speaker 1: to the end ice tell us the end, the completion,
2:03:15
Speaker 1: the nothing left undone finish. In the commerce of the
2:03:18
Speaker 1: ancient world, this word was written across a bill when
2:03:22
Speaker 1: it had been paid in full, not partially paid, not
2:03:26
Speaker 1: payment pending paid, done finished, He bowed his head and
2:03:32
Speaker 1: gave up his spirit. One of the soldiers pierces his
2:03:35
Speaker 1: side with a spear, and at once blood and water
2:03:38
Speaker 1: come out. The beloved disciple records what follows with an
2:03:42
Speaker 1: urgency he uses rarely in this gospel. He who saw
2:03:45
Speaker 1: it has borne witness. His testimony is true, and he
2:03:49
Speaker 1: knows that he is telling the truth that you also
2:03:52
Speaker 1: may believe. He was there, he saw the spear. He
2:03:56
Speaker 1: is telling you because he was there, and he needs
2:03:59
Speaker 1: you to know it is true. Two men come for
2:04:02
Speaker 1: the body. Joseph of Arimathea. A secret disciple asks Pilot
2:04:07
Speaker 1: for permission, and who comes with him carrying a mixture
2:04:11
Speaker 1: of myrrh and aloes, about seventy five pounds of it,
2:04:15
Speaker 1: enough for the burial of a king. Nicodemus, who came
2:04:19
Speaker 1: to Jesus by night at the beginning of this story,
2:04:22
Speaker 1: who asked how a man can be born again, who
2:04:25
Speaker 1: spoke quietly in the Sanhedrin and was dismissed, Who has
2:04:29
Speaker 1: traveled through the whole Gospel in the half light, slowly,
2:04:32
Speaker 1: at great cost to himself. He comes now in the open,
2:04:37
Speaker 1: with the burial spices of a king. Whatever was planted
2:04:41
Speaker 1: in him that night in the dark has come fully
2:04:44
Speaker 1: into the light. No more shadows, no more caution, no
2:04:49
Speaker 1: more calculating the cost. They take the body of Jesus
2:04:53
Speaker 1: and bind it in linen cloths with the spices. They
2:04:56
Speaker 1: lay him in a new tomb in a garden near
2:04:59
Speaker 1: the place of the Crucifer. The stone is set in
2:05:02
Speaker 1: place de de Lstai. It is finished. The night is quiet,
2:05:07
Speaker 1: the stone is in place. But the gospel has one
2:05:11
Speaker 1: more morning to describe the morning. This entire gospel has
2:05:15
Speaker 1: been moving toward from its very first sentence. A garden again,
2:05:20
Speaker 1: an empty tomb, a woman weeping, and a name spoken
2:05:24
Speaker 1: that changes everything. Chapter ten, The morning and the fire
2:05:33
Speaker 1: before the beach, there is a garden. It is the
2:05:36
Speaker 1: first day of the week, still dark. Mary Magdalen comes
2:05:41
Speaker 1: alone to the tomb. She sees that the stone has
2:05:44
Speaker 1: been taken away and runs immediately to Simon, Peter and
2:05:47
Speaker 1: the Beloved Disciple. They have taken the Lord out of
2:05:50
Speaker 1: the tomb, and we do not know where they have
2:05:53
Speaker 1: laid him. She has not looked inside. She has seen
2:05:57
Speaker 1: the stone removed and drawn the only conclue usion available
2:06:00
Speaker 1: to her in that moment. Her conclusion is rational, and
2:06:05
Speaker 1: it is wrong, and she has no way of knowing
2:06:08
Speaker 1: it is wrong. Peter and the Beloved Disciple run to
2:06:11
Speaker 1: the tomb. The Beloved Disciple outruns Peter and reaches the
2:06:16
Speaker 1: tomb first. He stoops to look in. He sees the
2:06:20
Speaker 1: linen cloths lying there, but he does not go in.
2:06:24
Speaker 1: Peter arrives and goes straight in. He sees the linen
2:06:27
Speaker 1: cloths lying there, and the face cloth that had been
2:06:30
Speaker 1: on Jesus's head, not lying with the linen cloths, but
2:06:33
Speaker 1: folded up in a place by itself. Then the beloved
2:06:37
Speaker 1: disciple goes in, and he saw and believed. He records
2:06:42
Speaker 1: his own belief quietly, without elaboration. He saw something in
2:06:47
Speaker 1: the arrangement of what was left behind, and he believed.
2:06:51
Speaker 1: And then he adds a sentence that is among the
2:06:53
Speaker 1: most honest in the entire Gospel. For as yet they
2:06:56
Speaker 1: did not understand the scripture that he must rise from
2:07:00
Speaker 1: the dead. He believed without fully understanding. Faith arrived before
2:07:05
Speaker 1: the theology was in place to explain it, the emptiness
2:07:08
Speaker 1: of a sealed tomb and the particular way the grave
2:07:11
Speaker 1: clothes lay, and he believed. They go home. Mary stays
2:07:15
Speaker 1: outside the tomb weeping. As she weeps, she stoops to
2:07:19
Speaker 1: look in. She sees two angels in white sitting where
2:07:22
Speaker 1: the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head
2:07:25
Speaker 1: and one at the feet. They say, woman, why are
2:07:29
Speaker 1: you weeping? She says, they have taken away my lord,
2:07:33
Speaker 1: and I do not know where they have laid him.
2:07:36
Speaker 1: She turns around. She sees someone standing in the garden.
2:07:40
Speaker 1: She supposes him to be the gardener. He says, woman,
2:07:45
Speaker 1: why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking? She says, sir,
2:07:51
Speaker 1: if you have carried him away. Tell me where you
2:07:53
Speaker 1: have laid him, and I will take him away. One
2:07:56
Speaker 1: word changes everything. He says Mary her name in his voice,
2:08:03
Speaker 1: the voice she has heard for years, the voice that
2:08:06
Speaker 1: taught and questioned and called Lazarus out of his tomb,
2:08:10
Speaker 1: that voice saying her name in a garden at dawn.
2:08:14
Speaker 1: She turns and says, Raboni, which means teacher. The good
2:08:20
Speaker 1: shepherd calls his own sheep by name, and they know
2:08:23
Speaker 1: his voice. He said it in chapter ten, and he
2:08:26
Speaker 1: does it now. The woman who came to the tomb
2:08:29
Speaker 1: in the dark to find a body has been found
2:08:31
Speaker 1: by her own name. Spoken in a familiar voice, he says,
2:08:36
Speaker 1: do not cling to me, for I have not yet
2:08:38
Speaker 1: ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and
2:08:41
Speaker 1: say to them, I am ascending to my Father and
2:08:44
Speaker 1: your father, to my God and your God. My father
2:08:48
Speaker 1: and your father, my God and your God. The relationship
2:08:53
Speaker 1: that was his from before the foundation of the world
2:08:56
Speaker 1: is now, because of everything that happened between the Upper
2:08:59
Speaker 1: Room and this guardon extended to the disciples. His father
2:09:03
Speaker 1: becomes their father. Mary Magdalene goes and announces to the disciples,
2:09:09
Speaker 1: I have seen the Lord, the first witness to the
2:09:12
Speaker 1: resurrection is a woman. In a world where the testimony
2:09:16
Speaker 1: of women was not accepted in courts of law, the
2:09:18
Speaker 1: first person sent to announce the resurrection is a woman.
2:09:22
Speaker 1: This is what the Gospel records. It preserves it without
2:09:26
Speaker 1: apology and without explanation. It is simply what happened, and
2:09:31
Speaker 1: the Gospel keeps it. That evening, the disciples are gathered
2:09:35
Speaker 1: behind locked doors. They are afraid. The doors are locked.
2:09:40
Speaker 1: Jesus comes and stands among them. He does not knock,
2:09:45
Speaker 1: He does not wait for the door to be opened.
2:09:47
Speaker 1: He stands among them. The body that was laid in
2:09:50
Speaker 1: the tomb is present in a room with locked doors.
2:09:54
Speaker 1: He says, peace be with you. He shows them his
2:09:57
Speaker 1: hands and his side. The disciple are glad when they
2:10:01
Speaker 1: see the Lord. He says again, peace be with you.
2:10:05
Speaker 1: As the Father has sent me, even so I am
2:10:07
Speaker 1: sending you. And he breathes on them and says, receive
2:10:12
Speaker 1: the Holy Spirit. In Genesis, God breathed into the nostrils
2:10:17
Speaker 1: of the first human being, and the human became a
2:10:20
Speaker 1: living creature. The same act here in a room with
2:10:23
Speaker 1: locked doors on the first evening of what the Gospel
2:10:26
Speaker 1: presents as the beginning of new creation. He breathes on them,
2:10:31
Speaker 1: receive the Holy Spirit. Thomas was not with them when
2:10:35
Speaker 1: Jesus came. The other disciples tell him, we have seen
2:10:39
Speaker 1: the Lord. Thomas says, unless I see in his hands
2:10:43
Speaker 1: the mark of the nails, and place my finger into
2:10:46
Speaker 1: the mark of the nails, and place my hand into
2:10:49
Speaker 1: his side, I will never believe. Thomas has been defined
2:10:53
Speaker 1: by this moment for two thousand years. But let us
2:10:57
Speaker 1: be precise about what Thomas is doing here. He is
2:11:00
Speaker 1: not rejecting the resurrection as a principle. He is asking
2:11:04
Speaker 1: for the same evidence the others received. They saw the Lord,
2:11:08
Speaker 1: they saw his hands and his side. Thomas is asking
2:11:11
Speaker 1: for what they were given, not more the same. Eight
2:11:16
Speaker 1: days later, the disciples are inside again. Thomas is with them.
2:11:21
Speaker 1: The doors are locked. Jesus comes and stands among them.
2:11:25
Speaker 1: Peace be with you. He turns to Thomas. Put your
2:11:29
Speaker 1: finger here and see my hands. Put out your hand
2:11:33
Speaker 1: and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.
2:11:38
Speaker 1: He knows what Thomas said. He was not in the
2:11:41
Speaker 1: room when Thomas spoke those words, and he knows exactly
2:11:44
Speaker 1: what Thomas asked for. Thomas answers, my Lord and my God,
2:11:51
Speaker 1: the highest confession of faith in the entire Gospel. Not
2:11:54
Speaker 1: just Lord, not just teacher, not just the Christ, My
2:11:59
Speaker 1: Lord and my God God, the full weight of devotion
2:12:02
Speaker 1: placed on the person of Jesus by the man history
2:12:05
Speaker 1: remembers as the doubter. Jesus says, have you believed because
2:12:10
Speaker 1: you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not
2:12:13
Speaker 1: seen and yet have believed. Blessed are those who have
2:12:17
Speaker 1: not seen. You have not seen. You were not in
2:12:21
Speaker 1: that room. You did not put your finger in the
2:12:23
Speaker 1: mark of the nails, or your hand in the wound
2:12:26
Speaker 1: in his side. You are hearing this in a time
2:12:29
Speaker 1: far removed from that locked room in Jerusalem. Blessed are you.
2:12:34
Speaker 1: The beatitude at the end of the resurrection appearances is
2:12:37
Speaker 1: for you, for every one who has not seen and
2:12:40
Speaker 1: yet has believed, or who is trying to believe, or
2:12:43
Speaker 1: who is somewhere between doubt and faith in the dark,
2:12:46
Speaker 1: listening to a story two thousand years old and finding
2:12:49
Speaker 1: in it something that might be true. Blessed are those
2:12:52
Speaker 1: who have not seen and yet have believed. Now the
2:12:55
Speaker 1: Gospel tells us why it was written. Now Jesus did
2:12:58
Speaker 1: many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which
2:13:01
Speaker 1: are not written in this book. But these are written
2:13:04
Speaker 1: so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ,
2:13:07
Speaker 1: the Son of God, and that by believing you may
2:13:10
Speaker 1: have life in his name. That is the purpose, not
2:13:15
Speaker 1: to record everything, not to be comprehensive, to give you
2:13:19
Speaker 1: enough enough to believe, and in believing to have life
2:13:24
Speaker 1: in his name. Now there is a beach. Peter says,
2:13:29
Speaker 1: I am going fishing. They say, we will go with you.
2:13:34
Speaker 1: They get into the boat. They fish all night. They
2:13:37
Speaker 1: catch nothing. Just as day is breaking, someone stands on
2:13:41
Speaker 1: the shore. He calls to them, children, do have any fish?
2:13:46
Speaker 1: They answer no. He says, cast the net on the
2:13:51
Speaker 1: right side of the boat and you will find some.
2:13:54
Speaker 1: They cast. They cannot haul the net in because of
2:13:57
Speaker 1: the quantity of fish. The beloved Disciple says to Peter,
2:14:02
Speaker 1: it is the Lord. Peter wraps his outer garment around
2:14:06
Speaker 1: him and throws himself into the sea. The other disciples
2:14:09
Speaker 1: come in the boat dragging the net full of fish.
2:14:13
Speaker 1: They are about a hundred yards from shore. When they
2:14:16
Speaker 1: get to land, they see a charcoal fire in place
2:14:19
Speaker 1: with fish laid out on it, and bread, a charcoal
2:14:22
Speaker 1: fire anthrakia, the same Greek word used only once before
2:14:27
Speaker 1: in this gospel, in the court yard of the High Priest,
2:14:31
Speaker 1: where Peter stood warming himself in the cold night air,
2:14:34
Speaker 1: and said three times that he did not know the
2:14:36
Speaker 1: man they had arrested. One charcoal fire for the denial,
2:14:40
Speaker 1: one charcoal fire for the restoration, the same word, different morning.
2:14:46
Speaker 1: The writer who chose that word both times knew exactly
2:14:50
Speaker 1: what he was building across the chapters between them. Jesus says,
2:14:54
Speaker 1: bring some of the fish that you have just caught.
2:14:57
Speaker 1: Peter goes and hauls the net ashore one hundred and
2:15:01
Speaker 1: fifty three large fish. The number is recorded precisely because
2:15:05
Speaker 1: it was counted, the kind of specific detail that stays
2:15:09
Speaker 1: in the memory of a person who was standing on
2:15:11
Speaker 1: that beach on that morning and has been carrying it
2:15:14
Speaker 1: for sixty years. Jesus says, come and have breakfast. None
2:15:20
Speaker 1: of the disciples dared to ask him who he was.
2:15:23
Speaker 1: They knew it was the Lord. Jesus comes and takes
2:15:26
Speaker 1: the bread and gives it to them, and does the
2:15:29
Speaker 1: same with the fish. Bread and fish shared beside a
2:15:33
Speaker 1: lake the morning after the night that caught nothing and
2:15:36
Speaker 1: it looks like breakfast on a beach around a fire.
2:15:41
Speaker 1: This is the risen Lord, the logos who was with
2:15:45
Speaker 1: God in the beginning, handing people bread and fish on
2:15:48
Speaker 1: a beach at sunrise, when they have finished breakfast, Jesus
2:15:52
Speaker 1: speaks to Simon Peter Simon, son of John, do you
2:15:57
Speaker 1: love me more than these? Simon Peter, not Peter, not
2:16:02
Speaker 1: the name that meant rock, Simon son of John, the
2:16:07
Speaker 1: full birth name, the name before the calling, the name
2:16:10
Speaker 1: from before he said, I will lay down my life
2:16:13
Speaker 1: for you before the fire in the courtyard, before the
2:16:17
Speaker 1: three times I am not. He says, yes, Lord, you
2:16:21
Speaker 1: know that I love you. Jesus says, feed my lambs.
2:16:26
Speaker 1: He asks a second time, Simon, son of John, do
2:16:30
Speaker 1: you love me? Peter says, yes, Lord, you know that
2:16:34
Speaker 1: I love you. Jesus says, tend my sheep. He asks
2:16:39
Speaker 1: a third time, Simon, son of John, do you love me?
2:16:43
Speaker 1: And Peter was grieved because he said to him the
2:16:46
Speaker 1: third time, do you love me? Three times? Beside a
2:16:51
Speaker 1: charcoal fire in the morning three times? The man who
2:16:54
Speaker 1: denied three times at a charcoal fire in the night
2:16:57
Speaker 1: is now asked by the man himself Peter says, Lord,
2:17:02
Speaker 1: you know everything. You know that I love you. Jesus says,
2:17:07
Speaker 1: feed my sheep. The threefold denial answered by a threefold restoration,
2:17:13
Speaker 1: not a ceremony, not a formal right of forgiveness, a
2:17:17
Speaker 1: conversation at breakfast, a fire, three questions, three declarations, and
2:17:24
Speaker 1: with each declaration a charge. Feed my lambs, tend my sheep,
2:17:30
Speaker 1: Feed my sheep. The man who failed three times in
2:17:34
Speaker 1: the dark is given responsibility three times in the light.
2:17:38
Speaker 1: Jesus speaks to Peter about what is coming. When you
2:17:41
Speaker 1: were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever
2:17:45
Speaker 1: you wanted. But when you are old, you will stretch
2:17:48
Speaker 1: out your hands and another will dress you and carry
2:17:51
Speaker 1: you where you do not want to go. The Gospel
2:17:54
Speaker 1: notes quietly this he said to show by what kind
2:17:57
Speaker 1: of death Peter would glorify God. And after saying this,
2:18:01
Speaker 1: he says to Peter, follow me two words, the same
2:18:06
Speaker 1: word spoken at the very beginning, when Peter and his
2:18:09
Speaker 1: brother Andrew were casting their net into this same sea,
2:18:12
Speaker 1: and Jesus walked along the shore and said, come follow me,
2:18:16
Speaker 1: the invitation that started everything spoken again at the end.
2:18:21
Speaker 1: Peter turns and sees the beloved disciple following them, He asks, Lord,
2:18:26
Speaker 1: what about this man? Jesus says, if it is my
2:18:30
Speaker 1: will that he remain until I come, what is that
2:18:33
Speaker 1: to you? You follow me? You follow me. Whatever happens
2:18:38
Speaker 1: to others, whatever path any one else walks, whatever you
2:18:42
Speaker 1: do not understand and cannot predict and cannot control, you
2:18:46
Speaker 1: follow me. The instruction is singular and personal. Not follow
2:18:51
Speaker 1: the group, not follow the plan, not follow the institution,
2:18:57
Speaker 1: follow me. Chapter final? Do you love me? Now? Let
2:19:06
Speaker 1: us close this Gospel the way it began, not with
2:19:09
Speaker 1: a scene with a question. The Gospel opened before the
2:19:13
Speaker 1: world was made. The Word was already there, the light
2:19:18
Speaker 1: was already shining, and the darkness, in all its long
2:19:21
Speaker 1: history of trying, had not overcome it. And the Gospel
2:19:25
Speaker 1: ends on a beach with a fire and a question
2:19:29
Speaker 1: asked three times to a man who failed three times
2:19:32
Speaker 1: in the dark. Do you love me? That is what
2:19:36
Speaker 1: this Gospel, across all its chapters and all its centuries,
2:19:39
Speaker 1: comes down to at its final scene. Not a doctrine,
2:19:44
Speaker 1: not a systematic statement, a question, personal direct asked by
2:19:51
Speaker 1: name to a specific person who had failed spectacularly and
2:19:56
Speaker 1: was now sitting beside a fire at sunrise eating fish Simon,
2:20:01
Speaker 1: son of John, Do you love me? He is asking
2:20:04
Speaker 1: you the same question to night. Not whether you understand
2:20:08
Speaker 1: him correctly, not whether you have your theology in order,
2:20:12
Speaker 1: not whether you can name the seven I Am statements,
2:20:15
Speaker 1: or explain the significance of the Greek word tetellestae, or
2:20:20
Speaker 1: remember how many fish were in the net. He is
2:20:23
Speaker 1: asking the oldest question, the simplest question, the question that
2:20:28
Speaker 1: underlies every other question this Gospel has raised. Do you
2:20:32
Speaker 1: love me? You do not have to answer it perfectly.
2:20:36
Speaker 1: Peter did not answer it perfectly. He answered it out
2:20:39
Speaker 1: of a grief that understood its own failure, and a
2:20:43
Speaker 1: love that had survived its own worst moment. Lord, you
2:20:47
Speaker 1: know everything. You know that I love you. He knows everything.
2:20:52
Speaker 1: He knows every moment you have warmed yourself at the
2:20:55
Speaker 1: wrong fire, every time you have denied knowing him in
2:20:58
Speaker 1: ways large and small. Every morning the rooster crowed and
2:21:03
Speaker 1: you understood what you had done. He knows, and he
2:21:07
Speaker 1: is still making breakfast on the beach. He is still asking, now,
2:21:12
Speaker 1: let me tell you where the people who traveled with
2:21:14
Speaker 1: you to night have ended up. James, the man from
2:21:18
Speaker 1: Knoxville who could not sleep when this night began, has
2:21:21
Speaker 1: been asleep for some time now. He does not know
2:21:24
Speaker 1: exactly when it happened. Somewhere in the vicinity of the
2:21:28
Speaker 1: bread of life, the thing that had been keeping him
2:21:31
Speaker 1: awake stopped pressing. The room felt different. Something settled in
2:21:36
Speaker 1: him the way bred settles quietly without announcement, in a
2:21:40
Speaker 1: way that will not make itself fully known until morning. Anna,
2:21:44
Speaker 1: the woman from Portland, who lay in the dark with
2:21:47
Speaker 1: a book she could not read, is in that territory
2:21:50
Speaker 1: between waking and sleep, where the mind lets go of
2:21:53
Speaker 1: what it was gripping. She is still turning something slowly,
2:21:57
Speaker 1: the phrase not of blood, nor of the will of man,
2:22:00
Speaker 1: but of God. She does not need to know yet
2:22:03
Speaker 1: what to do with it to night. She only needs
2:22:06
Speaker 1: to hold it the way you hold a smooth stone
2:22:09
Speaker 1: in your hand in the dark, feeling its weight, becoming
2:22:13
Speaker 1: familiar with its shape, without forcing it into a conclusion. David,
2:22:18
Speaker 1: the man from Cincinnati who stayed in his car because
2:22:21
Speaker 1: he was not ready to go inside, went inside a
2:22:24
Speaker 1: while ago. He ate something he sat in the quiet.
2:22:29
Speaker 1: He is not carrying what he came in with in
2:22:31
Speaker 1: quite the same way. Something about the sequence he heard
2:22:35
Speaker 1: tonight thrown out, then found the door still open. The
2:22:39
Speaker 1: shepherd who goes looking has shifted the weight of what
2:22:42
Speaker 1: he has been carrying for six years. He is going
2:22:45
Speaker 1: to sleep and see what it looks like in the morning.
2:22:49
Speaker 1: They have all been inside the prayer of Chapter seventeen
2:22:52
Speaker 1: to night, the prayer that reached forward across every century
2:22:56
Speaker 1: and gathered in everyone who would believe through the testimony
2:22:59
Speaker 1: of those first witnesses. They were named in that prayer
2:23:03
Speaker 1: before they were born, and so were you. The seven
2:23:07
Speaker 1: I Am statements have been spoken across the hours of
2:23:10
Speaker 1: this night. The bread that does not run out, the
2:23:14
Speaker 1: light that walks ahead of you in the dark, the
2:23:17
Speaker 1: door that opens to pasture. The shepherd who knows your
2:23:21
Speaker 1: name and does not run when the wolf comes. The
2:23:24
Speaker 1: resurrection that is not an event to wait for, but
2:23:27
Speaker 1: a person you can meet on a road outside a village.
2:23:30
Speaker 1: The way that is the destination itself. The vine from
2:23:34
Speaker 1: which all fruit comes. Seven faces of the same person,
2:23:40
Speaker 1: the Logos who was with God in the beginning and
2:23:43
Speaker 1: pitched his tent among us and loved us to the end.
2:23:47
Speaker 1: The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has
2:23:51
Speaker 1: not overcome it. It has not overcome it tonight, not
2:23:55
Speaker 1: in the darkness of whatever you are carrying, not in
2:23:58
Speaker 1: the grief that has been accumulating, or the failure that
2:24:01
Speaker 1: has been following, or the question that has been sitting
2:24:05
Speaker 1: underneath all the other questions for longer than you can
2:24:08
Speaker 1: easily say. The light is still shining, the vine is alive,
2:24:13
Speaker 1: the shepherd is calling, the bread is on the table,
2:24:17
Speaker 1: the door is open, And somewhere on ashore in the morning,
2:24:21
Speaker 1: a fire is burning. And the question is being asked again,
2:24:25
Speaker 1: not as a test you might fail, not as a
2:24:28
Speaker 1: condition you must meet, as the most important thing one
2:24:32
Speaker 1: person has ever asked another spoken in the tone of
2:24:36
Speaker 1: someone who already knows the answer and is asking because
2:24:40
Speaker 1: the asking itself is a form of love. Do you
2:24:43
Speaker 1: love me? Let us pray? Father. We have walked through
2:24:50
Speaker 1: this gospel tonight, from the logos in the beginning, to
2:24:54
Speaker 1: the breakfast on the beach, from the water that became wine,
2:24:57
Speaker 1: to the blood and water that flowed from the cross,
2:25:01
Speaker 1: From the man who came in the dark and in
2:25:03
Speaker 1: the end buried you in the open, to the woman
2:25:06
Speaker 1: who ran from the empty tomb, to the disciple who
2:25:09
Speaker 1: outran Peter, and went in and saw and believed. We
2:25:13
Speaker 1: have heard the seven I M statements. We have stood
2:25:17
Speaker 1: at the well, and at the pool, and at the tomb.
2:25:20
Speaker 1: We have sat in the upper room and been held
2:25:23
Speaker 1: inside a prayer that was prayed for us before we
2:25:25
Speaker 1: were born. We have watched the beloved Disciple stand at
2:25:29
Speaker 1: the cross when others ran, and sit at breakfast on
2:25:32
Speaker 1: the beach when the night of fishing caught nothing. And
2:25:36
Speaker 1: now we come to the end of this night with
2:25:38
Speaker 1: the question still in the air, do you love me? Lord?
2:25:42
Speaker 1: We answer the way Peter answered, imperfectly, out of a
2:25:47
Speaker 1: love that has survived its own worst moments and its
2:25:50
Speaker 1: own worst nights. Lord, you know everything, You know that
2:25:55
Speaker 1: we love you. Keep us through the night, Keep the
2:25:59
Speaker 1: question alive in us. Let it be the first thing
2:26:02
Speaker 1: we carry into the morning, spoken in the voice that
2:26:05
Speaker 1: calls us by name, beside the fire where breakfast is
2:26:09
Speaker 1: already waiting. Thank You for this gospel. Thank you for
2:26:13
Speaker 1: the testimony that traveled from that first community across two
2:26:17
Speaker 1: thousand years to arrive in this quiet room on this
2:26:20
Speaker 1: particular night. Thank You that the light is still shining
2:26:24
Speaker 1: and that the darkness has not overcome it am in
2:26:29
Speaker 1: This is the Gospel of John. The word that was
2:26:32
Speaker 1: in the beginning has been made known. The light that
2:26:35
Speaker 1: shines in the darkness has been seen. The love that
2:26:39
Speaker 1: goes all the way to the end has been shown.
2:26:42
Speaker 1: And the question hangs in the air of this room,
2:26:45
Speaker 1: quiet and patient and full of everything that has been said. Tonight,
2:26:49
Speaker 1: do you love me? You do not have to answer
2:26:52
Speaker 1: it now. The night is long, and the question is patient,
2:26:56
Speaker 1: and the one asking it has time. The bread is
2:26:59
Speaker 1: on the table, the vine is alive, the door is open.
2:27:04
Speaker 1: The shepherd knows your name. You are not too broken
2:27:08
Speaker 1: to be loved. You are not too far to be found.
2:27:11
Speaker 1: You are not too lost to be called by the
2:27:14
Speaker 1: voice that called Lazarus out of his tomb, and called
2:27:17
Speaker 1: Mary by her name in a garden at dawn, and
2:27:20
Speaker 1: called Simon by his birth name beside a charcoal fire,
2:27:25
Speaker 1: and asked him three times the question that undoes every
2:27:29
Speaker 1: denial to you love me. He knows the answer, He
2:27:34
Speaker 1: has always known the answer. The morning is already on
2:27:37
Speaker 1: its way, and when it comes, as it always comes,
2:27:41
Speaker 1: you will wake into the same morning the disciples woke
2:27:44
Speaker 1: into on the shore of that lake in Galilee, the
2:27:48
Speaker 1: smell of wood smoke and fish in the air, the
2:27:51
Speaker 1: water catching the first light, and a voice from the
2:27:54
Speaker 1: shore asking if you caught anything in the night. Cast
2:27:58
Speaker 1: the net on the right side and you will find
2:28:02
Speaker 1: good night.