So, You Believe in Jesus

By

Reverend Litton Logan

March 26, 2006

John 3:1-21 (NRSV)

¹Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. ²He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” ³Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” ⁴Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” ⁵Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. ⁶What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. ⁷Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ ⁸The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” ⁹Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” ¹⁰Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

¹¹“Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. ¹²If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? ¹³No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. ¹⁴And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, ¹⁵that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

¹⁶“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

¹⁷“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. ¹⁸Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. ¹⁹And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. ²⁰For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. ²¹But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

Sermon:

            As You have heard me say and most likely will hear me say often, our New Testament Scriptures were written to and for those early Christians, who were struggling to understand their relationship to God, to one another, and to others out side the faith in light of the teachings and witness of Jesus.  The New Testament authors in an attempt to correct misunderstandings, willful abuses of the Good News of God in Jesus, and theological confusions wrote the various books of the New Testament for encouragement and edification.  Thus, we are safe in saying that the New Testament is the Church’s book.  Each book reflects the church at a particular time and place trying to understand and live out the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

This understanding must be the back drop upon which all reading and study of the New Testament occurs.  To interpret scripture with one’s self as the center of reading and study is to set one’s self up to misunderstand scripture.  Scripture becomes relevant for us and to us when we find ourselves either in the same situation as the original audience or when we try to understand the original context.

Over the years, there has been a lot of time and energy spent trying to harmonize the Gospels, that is, foraging a sense of agreement between the Gospels or explaining certain differences between the Gospels in ways that none-the-less harmonize gospel commonalities and differences.

          I maintain that to try to harmonize the Gospels beyond a certain point is like squeezing four cakes into one, wrong-sized box and trimming off the excess to shut the lid.

          Therefore, as we look at our scriptures today in John’s Gospel, please, let us try to hear just John’s unique voice to his Christian community and not try to harmonize John’s voice with Matthew’s, Mark’s, and Luke’s unique voices.  I fear that if we don’t hear John’s unique voice it will mean that we have to cut away some of the most beautiful and profound insights into God’s reconciling love in Jesus Christ that have ever been written.

          With this said, let us look briefly at the people, the issues, and the controversies facing John’s church that prompted him to write his gospel in the first place.  We do this in a very broad stroke in interest of time.

            In John’s Christian mind the world is divided into primarily two groups: (a) those who believe that Jesus is the preexistent, divine Son of God who personifies as much as is humanly possible, God’s eternal reasons, purposes, and will for all humanity, and (b) those who don’t believe this.  There is a third group that is implied but dealt with only by implication—the world. 

Primarily, John writes to religious people or about religious people who are in some way or the other all ready involved in Christianity or in opposition to Christianity.

          Those who do not believe John’s understanding of Jesus can be further divided into four broad groups:

(1)     The Jews who reject Jesus as being anything except an itinerant, miracle-working-preacher common to the era.  The Jews as late as the writing of John’s gospel were kicking believers in Jesus out of the synagogues. 

(2)          There were the Palestinian Jews, most likely followers of John the Baptist, who would have seen Jesus as a descendent of David, an anointed prophet and miracle worker, like Moses, Elijah, and John the Baptist.  Jesus would have been the latest prophet of God calling the Jews to repent and assume a right relationship with God.

(3)          There would have been a group of Jewish Christians that opposed the Temple, like Stephen and the Hellenist, who carry out missions to convert the Samaritans.  In this process of converting Samaritans, they evidently alter their understanding of Jesus to a more Samaritan understanding, especially the idea that Jesus was a new Moses, a new Law bringer, teacher, and revealer who would restore his people of which the Samaritans saw themselves, contrary to mainstream Judaism, as a part. 

(4)     The inclusion of Samaritans as worthy recipients of the Gospel would have set the stage for the converting of Gentiles, who would have brought their own religious baggage to their belief in Jesus and tried to blend their pagan metaphysics with John’s community’s understandings of Jesus.  We believe that among this group of folks would have been the Gnostic Christians, who would later be judge a heretical sect by the greater Christian church.

As I said, all these groups and their various theologies and Christologies can be placed in either one or two camps:  Those who believe in the mystery of God’s incarnation in Jesus and those who understood him to be a human being, all be he a divine human being, who was anointed and commissioned by God to proclaim the Good News.

          For John, those who believe this latter position are in grievous error.  They reject John and his community’s understanding of God’s incarnation in Jesus and prefer to live in darkness—that is to live in their various, unenlightened religious understandings of Jesus and his life. 

          The heart of the difference between John’s understanding and the understandings of the other Jesus believers is quite honestly one of authority.  For John, Jesus is the absolute authority of God to command the believer’s life.  This is because some essential aspect of the Divine Self was in Jesus beyond an anointing and commissioning.  Jesus is not an addendum to Moses, he is not like Elijah, and he is not just one of many divine revealers who pop in and out of the human condition with the latest wisdom or good news.  In Jesus, in some mysterious way, John sees the Beginning and the End—the Old and the New—made flesh.  This is the only begotten Son of God, listen to him—he speaks, God speaks.

We see this clearly in the opening passages of John’s Gospel where the wisdom of God became flesh in Jesus and from other scriptures in John that are reminiscent of Exod. 3:14 where in God says, “I Am that I Am.”  Jesus says:

I am the bread of life (John 6:35)

I am the light of the world (John 8:12)

I am the good shepherd.

          I am often amazed at how we take bits and pieces of insights about Jesus from all across the New Testament and form our personal Christology.  We see this most clearly among Christians who really like the Gospel of John and his understanding of God as love.  Love, or more often maudlin sentimentally, becomes the model for people designing their own theology and religion.  Love as indulgence, tolerance, and emoting become the ways of salvation. Maudlin-ism masquerading as love becomes a license for all sorts of squirrelly religious stuff.  Furthermore, these same people deny these scriptures we heard read today that talk about eternal punishment for not believing that Jesus is the one and only, mysterious incarnation of God.

Such scriptures offend many peoples’ sense of sentimentality, liberality, and intellectualism.  It offends their notion of a universally Loving God who allows people to reap the eternal consequences of their choices.  However, many other Christians like such scriptures because it comforts their sense of security and justice to know that those people who reject Jesus, as they understand Jesus will get theirs in the end but they will be rewarded in heaven.  Such scriptures give many Christians comfort and status.  They are born again, real Christians, not like other so-called Christians. I hate to tell you the number of times I have heard people say this.  Growing up Baptist, we thought we were the only truly saved until I met some Church of Christ people.

          I would be untrue to the text if I didn’t point out that this is how John and his church’s believed also but for a different reason—another sermon.

          Let us not be so shallow as to believe that hearing the Gospel of God is a one shot affair.  Hearing the Gospel of God’s saving love in Jesus Christ is a process over time that starts with where a person is in their social, cultural, and spiritual context and development and moves them into an understanding of God’s loving and saving will in Jesus.  John understands the power of this movement in a person’s life is the work of the Holy Spirit, the ever-present power of God that brings the truth of Jesus to bear on the human condition for all time.

          It is the Holy Spirit that brings us to God’s saving work in the cross of the Christ.  The cross is not a shameful defeat of the Christ.  Our scriptures today refer to an incident in the Old Testament in Numbers 21, wherein the people of Israel became impatient with God and Moses for not delivering an enemy into their hands as soon as they had hoped.  They spoke against God and Moses and as they would later say, they sinned against God.  The writer understands that as punishment for their sin God sent a pestilence of snakes that bit and killed many Israelites.  When the people repented, Moses instructs that a brass serpent be forged and lifted up high as a focus of faith so that all who in true repentances and faith looked upon the bronze serpent would be saved from their snake bites.

          John sees a parallel between those who live in the darkness of  rejecting the absolute, final-word, God-presence in Jesus as being like the ancient Israelites who can only be saved by repenting and in faith looking up to God’s personal, saving work in the cross of Jesus at the expense of their lesser, religious understandings.  For John, the misguided religious people of his day—Jew, Jewish Christian, and Gentile Christian must come to understand that on the cross God was in Jesus reconciling the world to Himself in His death by becoming the propitiation of human sin.  Jesus is far more than a divine-human-prophet; Jesus is an incarnation of God—truly human and truly of God.  Jesus in John’s Gospel is not God, but is God’s preexistent wisdom, purposes, reason behind all creation incarnate in Jesus.

          John tells us some people spurn all attempts to come to this light of truth because of their prideful and comfortable understandings of God’s work in Jesus. 

We see this clearly in the opening versus of chapter 3, in Jesus conversation with Nicodemus.  Nicodemus under the cover of dark comes to Jesus and says that Jesus is truly of God because of the signs or miraculous things he does.  Jesus in effect says to Nicodemus, here you are one of the scholars and teachers of the Law and yet you do not understand that it is God’s grace—unmerited favor, love--that saves, not religion, law, rite, or ritual.

Nicodemus and all you other religious folks, unless you look beyond miracles, signs, prophecies, proof text-ing, etc., and see that it is the Love of God on the cross that saves, your are lost to the truth.  You must be born anew in this truth.  That is, you must be born of the spirit of God out of your old religious models that smack of works righteousness or you miss the mark. 

Nicodemus don’t you understand that when a person is so locked into their religious world view at the expense of being open to the ongoing revelations of the Spirit of God their religion becomes idolatrous. 

          I like the analogy—such people are living in the dark.  Let me give you an example of the kind of dark to which John refers.  When I was 13 or 14 years old, my family visited my grandmother who lived in Carlsbad.  While we were there, we visited Carlsbad Caverns.  After we had gone a good ways in to the Cavern, we stopped and the tour guide shut off the lights to show us how dark it was in the total absence of light.  I shall never forget the panic that struck me when I could not see my finger before it touched my eye.  Can you imagine people enjoying living like that?  Can you imagine the constant fear and anxiety of not seeing things that could harm you and the panic of not knowing what is out there?

          Yet, this is the analogy that John uses to describe those religious  people who live life seeing Jesus as just another prophet, just one among many holy men, just one of many who have come to give us a new increment of divine understanding that moves us up another rung in the ladder of human spiritual evolution and progress.  Jesus is not just a unique; divine-human to be interpreted and haggled over that in the end brings nothing but anxiety, fear, and uncertainty.

In John’s mind, Jesus is not just one among many but is the One and Only manifestation of God in human flesh.  Jesus is of the essence of God revealing what God truly desires of us.  For John, Jesus’ way is God’s way and God’s way is Jesus’ way.  No if, ands, or buts.

          It is in sensitivity to modern multi-culturalism, that I add that people other than Jews and Christians have had divine insights and taught divine ways of life.

          Buddha may have had some divine insights.  Mohammad may have had some divine insights.  Moses had divine insights.  I do not discount people other than Christians having divine insights, nor do I deny that God works in the lives of all humans who will be open to Truth.  Jesus taught divine insights on how to live life in relationship to others and God.  However, let us remember that divine insights as good and as right as they are to live by, for John are not eternal, life-saving insights.  That’s the point Jesus was making to Nicodemus about Pharisee-ism.

          I infer from reading and studying John’s Gospel several questions:  Why want people see this truth?  Why do people want to hold on to their “religions” and various understandings of who Jesus is, was, and isn’t at the expense of God’s saving truth in the cross of Jesus?  Easy answer:  We don’t want to submit ourselves to any absolute authority other than ourselves.  People don’t like the idea that there is nothing they can do to save themselves and must depend, in faith, upon God’s work on the cross.  This is the insight the Genesis writer exposes in the story of the fall—the self-destructiveness of human pride.  Deciding what to believe, how much to believe, and one’s level of commitment to one’s belief is essential to our sense of self-determination. 

We don’t want to hear John say we must lay down our lives for one another, not be willing to lay down, but lay down our lives.  In fact, the only commandment that Jesus gave in John’s Gospel says:

John 15:-15:15 (NRSV)
¹²“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.  ¹³No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. ¹⁴You are my friends if you do what I command you. ¹⁵I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.

People don’t want to hear Jesus say it is our love for one another that is the truest testimony of our love of God and proof of our salvation before God.  not our religion.  Love makes us vulnerable, out of control, susceptible to the lover.

People don’t want to hear that Christians must separate themselves, not participate in the spiritual and moral corruption of this world.  Separation means ridicule—injury to the sense of self—as well as being subject to something other than our personally derived values and intellect.

Prideful, secure religious people don’t want to hear that they must be open, second to second, to the on-going leadership of the Holy Spirit.  No, such people want the convenience and the illusion of being saved in terms of what they do and don’t do, believe and don’t believe, and their conventions and traditions instead of experiencing salvation as a dynamic and ever-present sense of God’s loving authority and guidance in their lives, second to second.  Pride doesn’t like it that God in Jesus on the cross did for us what we can’t do for ourselves with all our philosophies, sciences, and theologies. 

          Having said all that, I’ll now ask the question:

          So, You Believe in Jesus, do you?  Well what do you believe?  Can you support it scripturally?  How do you deal with the internal and external conflicts, secular and religious assaults on what you believe? 

No matter how you answer those questions remember John understood that salvation is a gift of God’s love that comes from our acceptance of that Love on the Cross of Jesus in spite of our religions.  Therefore, studying, learning, and struggling to understand the ways of Jesus and the context of his ministry in whatever book of scripture is simply the movement of our minds to discern the abundant ways of life here and now, while we wait.

Having said that, “Welcome to the world of living by faith, second to second, with the Holy Spirit”. 

Bibliography of References:

Duling, Dennis C. and Norman Perrin.  The New Testament: Proclamation and Parenesis, Myth and History. 3^rd ed. Fort Worth, Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1994,

iPreach 2005, Commentary Series—The New Interpreter’s Bible, v. 9 Luke, John. NIB Volume IX—The Gospel of John.  www.cokesburylibraraies.com