Month: October 2013

Red Letter Year: 10/17

John 6.1-15

1 After this, Jesus crossed over to the far side of the Sea of Galilee, also known as the Sea of Tiberias. 2 A huge crowd kept following him wherever he went, because they saw his miraculous signs as he healed the sick. 3 Then Jesus climbed a hill and sat down with his disciples around him. 4 (It was nearly time for the Jewish Passover celebration.) 5 Jesus soon saw a huge crowd of people coming to look for him. Turning to Philip, he asked, “Where can we buy bread to feed all these people?” 6 He was testing Philip, for he already knew what he was going to do.

7 Philip replied, “Even if we worked for months, we wouldn’t have enough money to feed them!”

8 Then Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, spoke up. 9 “There’s a young boy here with five barley loaves and two fish. But what good is that with this huge crowd?”

10 “Tell everyone to sit down,” Jesus said. So they all sat down on the grassy slopes. (The men alone numbered about 5,000.) 11 Then Jesus took the loaves, gave thanks to God, and distributed them to the people. Afterward he did the same with the fish. And they all ate as much as they wanted.12 After everyone was full, Jesus told his disciples, “Now gather the leftovers, so that nothing is wasted.” 13 So they picked up the pieces and filled twelve baskets with scraps left by the people who had eaten from the five barley loaves.

14 When the people saw him do this miraculous sign, they exclaimed, “Surely, he is the Prophet we have been expecting!” 15 When Jesus saw that they were ready to force him to be their king, he slipped away into the hills by himself.

Comments

John makes two significant changes in telling the story of Jesus feeding such a large crowd with such a small snack. The first change is adding the dialogue between Jesus and the disciples where Jesus is specifically testing them, trying to coax a trust-response from them. We almost expect one of them to say, “I don’t know how you’re going to do it, but after the wine incident, I know you will do something.” Andrew comes closest to saying this, offering the little bit of food he was able to find (even looking was an act of trust). But then Andrew almost apologizes for the bit of trust he has shown. Still, like the Samaritan woman, Andrew showed a tad bit of trust and that seems to have been enough for Jesus.

The other change is that in John’s account Jesus distributes the food directly to the people (in the other Gospels Jesus hands the food to the disciples who pass it out to the people). The disciples still assist here, but only in organizing the people and in picking up the leftovers. Jesus gives the food directly to the people. John wanted to accentuate the immediacy of Jesus to each follower. We will see this more fully with the promises regarding the coming of the Holy Spirit as another Counselor (Greek: Paraclete) who will continue Jesus’ work of teaching and leading his followers, but this scene serves as a nice foreshadowing of that, downplaying the mediating role of the initial followers and accentuating the immediacy of the cosmic Christ with all followers by his Spirit.

Which brings us back to the point of the first change. There are still hungry people to be fed, still a harvest to be gathered, still innumerable impossible kingdom work to be done. The Spirit still asks us these questions: “How are we going to do this?” And then the Spirit waits for any shred of a trust response from us to latch onto and carry forward the great and miraculous work of God in this world. We don’t bring the power or make the miracles happen. We just organize people and clean up afterward. But, wow, is that enough. The more often we offer our snack, the more often Jesus can feed thousands. What in the world are we waiting for?

New Living Translation (NLT) Holy Bible. New Living Translation copyright© 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale HousePublishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Red Letter Year: 10/16

John 5.25-47

25 “And I assure you that the time is coming, indeed it’s here now, when the dead will hear my voice — the voice of the Son of God. And those who listen will live. 26 The Father has life in himself, and he has granted that same life-giving power to his Son. 27 And he has given him authority to judge everyone because he is the Son of Man. 28 Don’t be so surprised! Indeed, the time is coming when all the dead in their graves will hear the voice of God’s Son, 29 and they will rise again. Those who have done good will rise to experience eternal life, and those who have continued in evil will rise to experience judgment. 30 I can do nothing on my own. I judge as God tells me. Therefore, my judgment is just, because I carry out the will of the one who sent me, not my own will.

31 If I were to testify on my own behalf, my testimony would not be valid. 32 But someone else is also testifying about me, and I assure you that everything he says about me is true. 33 In fact, you sent investigators to listen to John the Baptist, and his testimony about me was true. 34 Of course, I have no need of human witnesses, but I say these things so you might be saved. 35 John was like a burning and shining lamp, and you were excited for a while about his message. 36 But I have a greater witness than John — my teachings and my miracles. The Father gave me these works to accomplish, and they prove that he sent me. 37 And the Father who sent me has testified about me himself. You have never heard his voice or seen him face to face, 38 and you do not have his message in your hearts, because you do not trust me — the one he sent to you.

39 You search the Scriptures because you think they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me! 40 Yet you refuse to come to me to receive this life.

41 Your approval means nothing to me, 42 because I know you don’t have God’s love within you. 43 For I have come to you in my Father’s name, and you have rejected me. Yet if others come in their own name, you gladly welcome them. 44 No wonder you can’t trust! For you gladly honor each other, but you don’t care about the honor that comes from the one who alone is God.

45 Yet it isn’t I who will accuse you before the Father. Moses will accuse you! Yes, Moses, in whom you put your hopes. 46 If you really trusted Moses, you would trust me, because he wrote about me. 47 But since you don’t trust what he wrote, how will you trust what I say?”

Comments

It would take an entire book to unpack everything going on in this passage. But there is only one thing I want to focus on today. The religious leaders Jesus was addressing here were experts in the Hebrew Bible. They had much (if not all) of it memorized and had devoted their lives to understanding it. No doubt they had searched Scripture to understand what to think about John the Baptist and Jesus, as Jesus acknowledges in v. 39. The problem with their reading, however, was they were not reading Scripture through the lens of God’s love for them and the whole world. So much depends on how we approach Scripture, which is the basic message I’ve been trying all year to get across.

Because we are at least as prone as these religious leaders ever were to reading the Bible with unloving eyes. We don’t know the Scriptures as well as they did and we struggle as much as they did to read it in love, which puts us in an even more difficult place when it comes to really understanding what God is trying to communicate to us through Scripture. Remember how I told you John’s Gospel carried the main themes of God’s love for the world and the world’s hostility toward God? Even those of us who are in active relationship with God are still part of this hostile-to-God world. Our default mode of thinking is not loving, it is hostile. Hostile to God. Hostile to each other. Hostile even to our own selves. To really get what’s going on here, we have to interpret it all – Scripture, the world, each other, ourselves – through the framework of the love of God. It has become popular in some circles to talk about a “Christian worldview,” and while I generally despise such thinking (for reasons I should share here at some point), if there is any such thing as a way Christians are to view the world, it is through the love of God.

Whatever you do, don’t underestimate the importance of this. And don’t underestimate the difficulty.

New Living Translation (NLT) Holy Bible. New Living Translation copyright© 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale HousePublishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.