Transcription
And I talked about how hard it was to kind of lead into with this sermon. She said, oh, I think it’s just really beautiful. And how could you not love it? And I said, well, you can still love it and call it one of the more difficult things.
It’s not opposable there. And the reality is it’s packed quite a bit in it, quite a bit about God, who God is, who Christ is in this. And John doesn’t mince words.
Luke kind of eases into things. Mark kind of hits the ground running at a thousand miles an hour. Matthew, he eases in a little bit as well.
But John, John gives you the full statement of faith right off the bat and then tells you about Jesus’ ministry. He kind of gives you the intro, the cliff notes of everything that’s going to happen. He’s going to prepare you.
Now, statements like what John puts out there were created for a reason, because when you look at literacy during the time that scripture was written first, it wasn’t very high. So you would have to memorize, memorize a statement of faith like the Apostles’ Creed. Not the Athanasian Creed, because that’s a little long, but statements of faith were produced so that we could say what we believe without having to check a website, check a Wikipedia page, print out a form or have the many Heidelberg catechism in our back pocket.
Any of us ever have one of those? The fact is that these statements weren’t written for a Karl Barth, for a Socrates or an Aristotle. These statements of faith were written so that everyday people, you, me, our young people could look and read and understand and believe. That’s why this happens.
That’s why John is setting this out. He’s preparing and building a foundation. Now, certain parts, as we look, are matter of fact for us.
Well, but we’re not new believers, are we? Now, Jesus is called true light and lightens everyone. Again, when we look at that, we might think of the Christmas pageant. Great job, by the way, guys.
Thinking of the kids singing This Little Light of Mine, not the commercial because, well, see me about that whole line of statement about why This Little Light of Mine does not belong in a commercial. The fact is we can’t, Jesus couldn’t flip a switch and have a 100 watt bulb light up the room. That’s not the light that Jesus is talking about, that John is writing about.
When we talk about the light of the world, we are talking about something that shines brighter than a 1000 watt bulb, shines brighter than any candle you have ever seen. I mean, have you ever turned out the lights in your house or had a power outage? And candles are all you have. I remember outages in Grand Rapids and sitting and trying to play board games with candles on each side of the board, and somehow my brother’s piece always would drift one space over when he thought that you couldn’t see.
The fact of the matter is you can’t see well, but with Christ you see everything. It lights everything. We don’t need to try and pull out a flashlight and shine it because we have Christ.
John goes and makes a controversial statement at verse 10. He was in the world and the world came into being through him. Yet the world did not know him.
He was in the world, might not seem like the great lightning rod that it was because the reality is a God which walked among us, which lived among us, was not common. When the people around Jesus thought of God, they thought of the amorphous voice that came from their own past history if they were Jewish. They would think of the gods of the Greek and Roman pantheon that treated humanity like toys, playthings, that would come down from on high on Mount Olympus only to make humans’ lives miserable.
Then you talk about the animistic gods, the Zoroastrian gods that were not tangible, not on this earth. So it is beyond reshaping to think that we have a God who felt human touch, who felt the love of a mother when he was born, who felt the betrayal of his disciple and the 30 pieces of silver. We have a Lord who walked miles, who healed, who saw humanity at its best with his own eyes, who saw humanity at its worst also with his own eyes.
We have a God who saw what it’s like for us. And that’s beautiful, but again, that is counter to what had been. And so as Jesus progresses through his ministry, as John tells of that progression, we see certain pieces.
Because it’s not just verse 10 that’s shattering to the world, because Jesus then talks about he came to what was his own and his own people did not accept him. There were those who rejected Jesus. Those who should have seen him for who he was, couldn’t.
They couldn’t see who he was. They heard his ministry. They heard his teachings and they couldn’t get there.
They couldn’t love their neighbor. They couldn’t get to where he was going. But but there were some who did believe.
And those people who did believe were given a beautiful gift. To be children of God. Children of God.
Think about that. Think about all that is in that state. When you are a child of a person, that parent should go to the nth degree for you.
When you are a child of God, God will go to the nth degree and the nth degree and the nth degree for you. Because you are his. Think about who that puts you up there with.
Who is God’s other child? Christ, who is God’s family, all of us, and God is with all of us. God is watching over all of us as a good parent should through thick and thin and everything in between. But think also of the way things had been, the way there was a curtain in which encased the holy of holies that you couldn’t enter into.
You couldn’t be in the very presence of God. And yet. We, as Christ’s followers.
Have that special place, have that special privilege of being. In his family. With his father.
Who is also our father, you think about the phrase walking a mile in someone’s shoes. We use it often. But we don’t think about it in terms of what God did.
For the longest time, what God was doing was watching and communicating through the prophets. And instead of communicating through the prophets, God then decides to go through himself through the sun and the sun. The sun walks in our shoes, he walks in humanity’s shoes, and so whatever we face in our world, our Lord has been there.
Maybe not in the exact same way we have been. But God has felt pain, God knows love, our love and its imperfections through Christ. God has been there with us and knows our many fears, our problems, our struggles and our strains.
So in the beginning was. Right now, he is. Tomorrow and the days ahead, he will be.
May you trust and listen and love him. Amen. Let us respond to God through our gifts.