Jesus is Life: A Meditation on John 11 for the 5th Sunday in Lent

Then said Martha unto Jesus,

Lord, if thou hadst been here,

my brother had not died.

 But I know, that even now,

 whatsoever thou wilt ask of God,

God will give it thee.

 

Jesus saith unto her,

Thy brother shall rise again.

 

Martha saith unto him,

I know that he shall rise again

 in the resurrection at the last day.

 

Jesus said unto her,

I am the resurrection, and the life:

he that believeth in me,

though he were dead, yet shall he live:

And whosoever liveth and believeth in me

shall never die. Believest thou this?

 

She saith unto him, Yea, Lord:

I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God,

which should come into the world.

 

Among the inescapable realities which Lent encourages us to face, is the inevitability of death.  In the 11^th chapter of John’s Gospel, we learn of Lazarus, a friend of Jesus and of his ministry, who was also a familial relation to both Mary and Martha.  Lazarus had become ill, and as a result of that illness, he died.  Messengers had been sent to Jesus to woo Him back to Lazarus’ side in order to heal him, but Jesus very intentionally did not do so.  And when Jesus told His disciples that He was heading back to “wake” Lazarus, they appeared to concur with Thomas that they were destined to die right alongside him.  Even Martha and Mary could not reconcile their grief at Lazarus’ death with Jesus’ claim to be the very “resurrection and the life” they were hoping for, perhaps because death was to them (as it is for us) such an engrossing event.  When Jesus actually called Lazarus out of the tomb in which he had laid dead four days, by the power of His own spoken Word, the shock among everyone who witnessed it seems even more overwhelming.  Many believed on Jesus, and others went to the Pharisees to plot Jesus’ death, but what Jesus had done in raising Lazarus from the dead was incontrovertible:  death was the unconquerable enemy of all mankind, and Jesus had just sent it away with a Word.

 

Jesus raising Lazarus was certainly a foreshadowing of the Resurrection Jesus would accomplish in Himself after having been tortured and murdered through the collusion of Jewish and Roman authorities.  However, it was also a revelation of who Jesus really is, and why it matters so much for every human being on the planet.  There is no one in the history of the world who has saved themselves from death by their own power.  In the history of the Old Testament, there are two individuals—Enoch of the ancient pre-Noah era, and Elijah during Israel’s prophetic period—who appear to have been taken from the earth by God without having died, but everyone else has succumbed to some sort of illness or violence that separated their spirit from their body.  Even Lazarus would eventually die again after Jesus raised him, with the Church’s history and traditions placing him as a bishop in Cypress before dying again about 30 years later.  Death is the curse which all men must face, because sin indwells all men, and the wages of sin is death.  Whether we fear it, ignore it, obsess over it, chase it, hide from it, or run from it, death catches up to everyone eventually.

 

Fortunately, death isn’t the end of the story, because Jesus wouldn’t let it be.  Instead of allowing us to simply bear our curse and the justice due for our evil, Jesus entered into the life and death of our humanity so that He might shepherd us all through to a life that never ends.  Death is certain for us, but it is not final, because the Author of Life has conquered death for us so that we might live forever with Him.  When Jesus told Martha that He is the resurrection and the life, He wasn’t using a metaphor or symbology—Jesus really is, in Himself and according to His divine nature, life.  Death is not organic to God’s nature, but a consequence in us due to our rejection of Him.  We experience death because our race is fallen away from God, and the Original Sin of our first parents is passed along to every successive human until the end of the world, causing our bodies to sooner or later break down, and our spirits to return to our Maker.  It is, therefore, a mark of infinite love and grace that God condescends to us in our fallen state to pay the justice due for our sins through His Cross, and then offer to us the gracious gift of forgiveness and life in Jesus.  Death is inevitable for all, but it isn’t the end of our story.  Because Jesus is the Eternal Word of the Father which speaks life even to the dead, we know that we have a future beyond death, secure in His fellowship and His Kingdom which has no end.

 

Jesus is Life.  That realization is greater even than the irrefutable fact that death comes for us all.  Like Mary and Martha, we are tempted to fall into our grief over death like it was the end of the world, as if somehow God has failed us if He hasn’t perpetually prevented the deaths of those we love.  But the reality is that God has not taken away from us the temporal consequences of our fallen nature, but rather, entered into our fallenness so that we might rise again from it.  God has not unmade us from what we were, but He has made us new in Jesus, transformed by love and grace into His children so that even death cannot separate us from Him.  Such love and grace pours out to us lavishly by His Word, giving us faith to trust in Him unto eternal life.  And as it is Jesus alone who is the Only Begotten Son of God; Jesus alone who unites in Himself our humanity with His divinity; Jesus alone who lived a perfect life of service to His Father in the unbroken fellowship of the Holy Spirit; Jesus alone who ascended the Cross as our spotless sacrificial Lamb, who alone could bear in Himself the eternal judgement due to every living soul; Jesus alone who by His own power rose from the dead and gave the free gift of His grace and forgiveness to His disciples, so that they might give it away as freely as they had received it; Jesus alone who ascended on high to the right hand of the Father, who sent to us the Holy Spirit to be our Comforter, wisdom, and power until His final return to judge the living and the dead; so it is by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone that eternal life is poured out to all people.

 

Be of good cheer, dear Christian, for though death will come for you, it cannot overcome you, for Jesus has conquered death for you already.  And by His victory will all the saints who have pressed on before us be united together with us when we arrive in that hallowed Kingdom, because we all will live forever in our Savior who is Life immortal.  Let the devil rage and the nations imagine vain things—let the tumults of the world and of our own lives fade into the background of our minds by this one overwhelming truth:  Jesus is Life, and He is our life, now and forever, and unto ages of ages without end.  Soli Deo Gloria!  Amen.

 

 

Light and Judgment: A Meditation on John 9 for the 4th Sunday in Lent

And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth.

And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin,

this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?

 Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents:

but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.

I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day:

the night cometh, when no man can work.

As long as I am in the world,

I am the light of the world.

 

In this story recounted by St. John of a man blind from birth whom Jesus healed, it is interesting to note that both Jesus’ disciples and the Pharisees noted later in the chapter, had the same wrong impression of this blind man:  that his deformity was a judgment of his own sin.  Jesus corrected His disciples and taught them their assumption was false, and rather that this man’s malady was allowed to persist so that God’s good works might be made manifest in him.  While it is true that God sometimes punishes specific sins of individual people by visiting particular temporal consequences upon them, and that sometimes He visits the sins of the fathers upon their children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate Him (cf. Exodus 20, and the giving of the 10 Commandments to Moses at Mt. Sinai,) not all calamity in this world is directly related to any individual’s sins.  Sometimes it is a general consequence of man’s fall into sin that each of us inherits a broken a body destined to die sooner or later, and sometimes specific calamities are allowed to occur so that God might make Himself known by His grace poured out in the midst of them.  In every instance, God is not the author of evil, but He is the only Almighty, Omniscient, and Righteous Judge in the universe, so however He allows things to play out in this world, He does so with a Wisdom beyond the reach of mortal men.  And when He comes into the world to teach mankind His will by His Word, He manifests Himself as the Light of the World which quickens everyone who hears and believes in Him.

 

It is an interesting coincidence that both Jesus’ disciples and the Pharisees rushed to judgment of the blind man in their own thoughts.  Of course, Jesus’ disciples asked Him for guidance, and their ignorance was alleviated.  The Pharisees on the other hand, abused the now healed blind man, even to the point of excommunicating him from the religious community.  Rather than checking their rush to judgment in the presence of an authentic miracle and seeking the wisdom of God, the Pharisees pressed their false logic to conclude that this healed man was “entirely born in sins,” and therefore an unworthy vessel to teach the Pharisees anything of value.  Jesus received the man he had healed, called him to faith, and then declared it was for judgment He had come into the world—that those who thought they could see would be shown for their true blindness, and those who acknowledged their blindness in repentance and faith would receive new sight.  John recorded Jesus’ teaching about light and darkness more than any of the other Gospel writers, perhaps because he perceived by inspiration that this focus of Jesus’ teaching was such a powerful and enduring image of what God was really doing among men.  The world was and remains a dark place in many quarters, where people consumed in judgement against each other perpetuate countless atrocities and miscarriages of justice against one another, while God continues to bring the light and wisdom of His grace and mercy through His Incarnate Word, Jesus Christ.

 

And while the darkened minds of unbelieving people wound and devour each other with irrational calls for false justice against their fellow men, it is the Light of God which always produces true and honest judgment.  In the Light of God’s Word we see what true good and evil really are, what the demands of the Law inescapably impose upon every living soul in the cosmos.  The Light of God speaks Truth into the convolution of darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it, anymore than a room full of darkness can resist the light of even one small candle burning bright.  Light is always more powerful than darkness, because darkness is simply the absence of Light; when Light appears, those who embrace darkness by definition must flee away, closing their minds lest they be illuminated by the Truth they have rejected.  God’s Word always brings with it both mercy and judgment, grace and condemnation, because His Word always calls for faith.  It is not our choice that the Word of God comes to us, nor that He calls us into His marvelous Light and eternal life through His Only Begotten Son, but it is our choice what we do with that Word once it comes to us.  If we confess our ignorance and evil before God in faith and repentance, He will illumine us by His Word and Spirit, making us alive in Him by grace through faith.  But if we reject His Word, cling to our evil and flee further away from Him into darkness, then the Light of God becomes a declaration against us that we preferred the negation of darkness rather than His life-giving Light.  God’s Word never comes back void of the purpose for which it is sent, as it will always bring either life or death, depending on how it is received.

 

While at first this may seem terrifying, it is in reality a tremendous relief to all who meditate more deeply on it.  We are not responsible for bringing the Word of God down from heaven, nor are we responsible for the conversion of the world, or even of our own soul.  It is God who works salvation for everyone who will believe in Him, and it is God who establishes His incontrovertible Means of Grace to deliver that salvation to all.  We are not accountable for how God sends His Word into the world, nor for the decisions of other people who either accept or reject it.  We, like all people, are beggars in the darkness, upon whom the Light of God’s Eternal Word has dawned, bringing with it the promise of forgiveness, life, and salvation to everyone who will repent and believe in Jesus.  If God is satisfied to allow us to either accept or reject Him, to freely love or despise Him, suspending the Final Judgment until the last possible moment of the world so that the greatest number of His foreknown saints might be ushered into His Kingdom, why should we be tormenting ourselves about such things?  It is God who saved us by His Word, and His Gospel that has transformed us into His people, which is the same Means of Grace that He sends to all people in every time and place.  Ours is not to judge the people of the world who suffer under the curse of darkness, but to reflect the Light of Christ to them so that they might be saved by that Word just as we have been.  The judgement of the Law will come in its own inexorable time, and that is not for men to conduct; but the Gospel of the Lord’s Vicarious Atonement for the sins of the world, of His victory over sin, death, hell, and the devil, is ours to proclaim to every soul we meet.

 

To be sure, there is no Gospel without the Law, and our duty is to receive and live in the whole counsel of God revealed in Holy Scripture.  And even as we proclaim Law and Gospel to the whole world so that all might come to faith and repentance before the Light of God’s Eternal Word, we remember that it is not the Law which saves us, but the grace and mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ poured out to us through His Cross.  We are not called to judge the world, but we are called to surrender ourselves to the Judgment of God, where our sentence is paid by the shed Blood of our Savior King, and where all who live forever, live by grace through faith in Him alone.  Soli Deo Gloria!  Amen.

 

Spirit and Truth: A Meditation on John 4 for the 3rd Sunday in Lent

The woman saith unto him,

 Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet.

Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say,

 that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.

 

Jesus saith unto her,

Woman, believe me, the hour cometh,

 when ye shall neither in this mountain,

nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father.

Ye worship ye know not what:

we know what we worship:

 for salvation is of the Jews.

But the hour cometh, and now is,

when the true worshippers shall worship the Father

 in spirit and in truth:

 for the Father seeketh such to worship him.

God is a Spirit: and they that worship him

must worship him in spirit and in truth.

 

When Jesus engaged the Samaritan woman at the well, there was much for Jesus to help her understand, including this idea that God desires people who will worship Him in spirit and in truth.  In the context of the question the woman asked Him, Jesus pointed out that a debate over which mountain people should worship on would soon be moot; and while Jerusalem was the center of authentic worship of the One, True God while the Samaritans indulged a polytheistic mix of religious practices, that One, True God was looking to create something much greater.  Just as God was not contained in a Tabernacle with Moses, neither was He contained in a Temple with Solomon, nor any of the successive houses of worship made for Him by human hands.  Since God is a Spirit who transcends all things, not least because He is the Creator of all things, debates about ceremonies and special places would be superseded in the New Covenant by Jesus Christ as the Incarnate Word, through whom the Holy Spirit of the Father moved to work the salvation of all who would believe in Him.

 

Taking the second term first, Truth is a concept highly derided in modern America.  This derision rose with a school of philosophy that supposed knowledge of all things to be subjective, relative only to a person’s perspectives, opinions, and senses.  Post-modernism as an intellectual movement surged through the academies and even many seminaries of western civilization in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries, until any claim to knowing or proclaiming Truth was met with immediate disdain.  The only Truth of the Post-modernists is that which is true to the individual, often reflected as what they call a lived experience or self-determined identity.  Not only did Post-modernism turn the minds of its students to mush, embracing a philosophy that was incoherent and unlivable (who would trust a doctor or engineer that didn’t understand the objective truth of medicine or materials, or drive a car without affirming the objective truth of roads, engines, steering, and brakes?) but it also deafened people to appeals like what Jesus made to the Samaritan woman.  Truth must be objective and it must be real, discernable from that which is not true and not real, if Jesus can make the claim that God desires people to worship Him in Truth.  Yet while a whole civilization repeats Pilot’s refrain, “What is truth?” our God continues to appeal to all people on the grounds of Truth and reality.

 

God is the beginning and end of all things, the Creator and the Judge, the Alpha and the Omega, which makes God Himself the very ground of all Truth.  All that is created is given existence by Him, and all that He has created is accountable to Him.  For us, that means that whether we want to believe it or not, our very existence declares the majesty of God just like all of creation does, and we are accountable to God our Creator for how we live the lives He has given us.  This truth is as inescapable as our very existence, and goes on forever, because even though we may die in this world our spirit retains an eternal life.  We will each give an account of our lives to God, and we will all be judged by what is True and what is real.  How do we know this?  Because God, who is Truth, sent His Son into our flesh to be for us the only Way, Truth, and Life apart from which no one will be reconciled with God.  We know God who is Truth, by the Word of Truth which He has declared to us through His Prophets and Apostles, and ultimately through the revelation of His Only Begotten Son.  This is the Truth in which the Father desires worship, that all people might believe Him and His Word, trusting in Him to be faithful and true, and to save all those who put their faith in Him.

 

And this leads to the first term, which is spirit—the innermost part of a person that never dies.  Our spirit is breathed into us by His Holy Spirit, giving us life from the Author of Life.  Our spirit, what the older philosophers before the Post-modern age referred to as the Mind or soul, is where our true intellect resides beyond even the material of our brains.  Our spirit is that which knows things no experience can teach, such as the nature of eternity and the abstract principles of moral obligation.  Our spirit is that part of us to which the Word of God speaks, and where the Holy Spirit creates faith through that Word to trust that Word unto eternal life.  Our spirit, informed and enlivened by God, is what receives the new birth from above by Water and Spirit, where grace reigns supreme over judgment, and faith clings to His promises even through mortal death.  To worship God in spirit is to worship Him in true faith, trusting Him to be our Savior just as He has shown us to be our Creator, turning from all other false words to cling to His truth alone.  It is our spirit that hears the voice of our Good Shepherd, that follows Him wherever He leads, taking up our Cross to suffer in this darkened world for the sake of witnessing to Him. This is what it means to worship God in spirit and truth:  that our spirit is informed and transformed by His Holy Spirit working through His Word, that we might receive His grace unto eternal life by a living, trusting faith in Him.

 

Let go the delusions of our age, and hear again the Word of the Lord!  For He is Spirit and He is Truth, and He has come to give you life by His Word that you might rise up to worship Him forever in spirit and truth.  You were made for more than the confusion and uncertainty of our times, for your very life is a gift from the One who is Life, who is Truth, and who is the only Way to reconciliation with God, so that you might live forever, forgiven and free in Him.  Let go the debates about lesser things, and cling again to Him who is the source and summit of both Truth and Spirit:  Jesus Christ.  Soli Deo Gloria!  Amen.

 

Born Again: A Meditation on John 3 for the 2nd Sunday in Lent

There was a man of the Pharisees,

named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews:

The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him,

Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God:

for no man can do these miracles that thou doest,

except God be with him.

Jesus answered and said unto him,

Verily, verily, I say unto thee,

Except a man be born again,

he cannot see the kingdom of God.

 

Jesus’ engagement with Nicodemus in the third chapter of John’s Gospel began with a teacher of the Jews coming to Jesus by night to escape public notice.  The Pharisees were greatly offended by Jesus and His teaching, but they could not explain away the miracles He wrought, so Nicodemus tried to unwind that mental dichotomy by talking to Jesus privately and directly.  Jesus challenged him further by revealing that no one, including those who thought themselves most religiously observant and holding positions of power or authority, could see the Kingdom of God without having been born again by Water and Spirit.  Not only did this preclude Nicodemus from finding a path he could walk by his own power, but it put him into a position of passivity in which he could only receive rather than take the salvation he knew he needed.  What Nicodemus needed in that moment was not necessarily to understand all the complexities and intricacies of how Jesus fulfilled the Prophets as the Messiah long promised to Israel, but to believe in the Word made Flesh who dwelt among them for the express purpose of saving them.  As Jesus revealed, no one born simply of man could inherit His Kingdom, because the faithless, fallen world could not receive the holy things of God.  Only God could come to save the world, and the world could only be saved through Him—a principle which made the good news of the Gospel one of grace alone, received by faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone.

 

Such faith which leads to true repentance and everlasting life, is the second birth Jesus spoke of.  That birth couldn’t be produced by those being born, any more than a person born of their parents could effect their own existence.  People don’t choose to be born, nor do they seek to be born, or work to be born.  Anyone who exists, is given their existence by a work of divine grace mediated through a mother and a father—there is no human being who came into the world any other way.  Even if scientists fiddle with the elements of human DNA and try to weave together strands of genetic material into a new life, any resulting child is still born of a mother and a father, no matter how occult the methodology.  People don’t make themselves, and they have no choice in the matter of being born.  Likewise, when Jesus instructed Nicodemus that a person must be born again of Water and Spirit in order to receive the spiritual blessings of God’s eternal Kingdom, no person would be in a position to give it to themselves.  The means of such birth are in God’s will alone, far beyond any macabre technologist who might want to tinker with it.  It is God alone who gives the second birth, so that a person might be made a fully restored child of God, destined to eternal life with Him, and saved from the condemnation justice demands of a dark and fallen world.  The second birth of the Spirit, where faith clings to Jesus and receives His grace as the forgiveness of sins, eternal life, salvation from hell, and victory over the evil one, is no more a choice of those who are born than their own individual existence is their choice.

 

Likewise, the Means of such Grace are entirely in the power of God to establish, and not for men to change.  St. Paul would note the same principle in his epistle to the church at Rome, when he told them that faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.  Jesus, as the Word made Flesh, is the Author and Finisher not only of the written Word in the Holy Scriptures, but also of the faith which grants eternal life in all who follow Him.  Jesus alone could speak the New Covenant of grace by faith, because Jesus alone could accomplish that Word through His life, death, and resurrection.  He is the Word by which we are saved, just as He is the Word spoken to us through His Prophets and Apostles in the whole of Scripture.  It is Jesus who promised to send His Holy Spirit to His people after His ascension, so that they would be empowered to believe and live in His saving Word.  Thus the Word has always been the Means of Grace which gives life to the world, from the Creation until the very end of all things, with the power of the Holy Spirit to make certain whatever He has spoken.  The Word of the Lord never returns void of the purpose for which it is sent—to those who receive it in faith, it brings life, and to those who reject it unbelief, it brings perdition.  But always and everywhere, it is the Word and Spirit of the Living God which brings forth life, and it is the Word and Spirit of God alone which causes His people to be born again unto eternal life.

 

Properly understood, this brings profound focus to the mission of God’s people, and clears away the confusion of the modern age.  No place is found for men to build utopia on earth, or to build their stairways to heaven.  There is no plan or method or device of men which will earn satisfaction before God, just as there is no ceremony or ritual or liturgy which will make one holy.  The new birth from above by Water and Spirit is a work of God alone, moving through His Word alone, and centered in Jesus alone.  For the people of God, their work is not in the salvation of themselves nor of others, but to believe, trust, and live in the Word which has already given them life, and which is the only Means of Grace which can enliven the whole world.  The Church of Jesus Christ is founded upon Jesus alone as her Chief Cornerstone, whose Word alone brings life through the power of His Holy Spirit so that all who trust in Him are reconciled to the Father, living together in the blessed communion of the Holy Trinity forever.  Therefor the Church has no greater treasure than the Word of God, and no greater charge than to live in His Word by grace through faith, so that life might flow through them and to all who will repent and believe that same saving Word.  For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.

 

Be of good cheer, whoever you are, to whom the Word of the Lord has come!  For the Lord of Glory has come to you with all the power of His Holy Spirit, to give you faith to believe all that He has spoken to His people through His Prophets and Apostles, and to center your faith on the saving work of Jesus Christ so that grace upon grace might be multiplied unto you.  For Jesus has come to save you, not by your own weak powers, but by His Almighty power working in love for you.  Hear Him, be born from above by Water and Spirit, and behold the Kingdom of God come down to men by the immutable majesty of His Eternal Word.  Soli Deo Gloria!  Amen.