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Posts Tagged ‘Gospel of John’

The man who only knew one thing (Gospel of John, chapter 9)

Posted in logos, tagged , , , on August 29, 2023| Leave a Comment »

(Series: Jesus’ ‘signs’ in the gospel of John)

27 August 2023

Wethersfield Evangelical Free Church, Wethersfield, Connecticut, USA

We’re in a series of messages about the signs of Jesus as these come to us in the fourth gospel, the gospel of John. Today we look at the sixth of the seven signs of Jesus in that book. The account of this sign is found in John, chapter 9. It’s a long story, so let’s please do our best to focus on it as I read its forty-one verses.

They go like this…

John 9:1   As (Jesus) passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” 3Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him. 4 We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. 5 As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” 6 Having said these things, he spit on the ground and made mud with the saliva. Then he anointed the man’s eyes with the mud 7and said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing.

John 9:8   The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar were saying, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?” 9 Some said, “It is he.” Others said, “No, but he is like him.” He kept saying, “I am the man.” 10 So they said to him, “Then how were your eyes opened?” 11 He answered, “The man called Jesus made mud and anointed my eyes and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’So I went and washed and received my sight.” 12 They said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I do not know.”

John 9:13   They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. 14Now it was a Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. 15 So the Pharisees again asked him how he had received his sight. And he said to them, “He put mud on my eyes, and I washed, and I see.” 16 Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath.” But others said, “How can a man who is a sinner do such signs?” And there was a division among them. 17 So they said again to the blind man, “What do you say about him, since he has opened your eyes?” He said, “He is a prophet.”

John 9:18   The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight, until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight 19 and asked them, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?” 20 His parents answered, “We know that this is our son and that he was born blind. 21 But how he now sees we do not know, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself.” 22 (His parents said these things because they feared the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that if anyone should confess Jesus to be Christ, he was to be put out of the synagogue.) 23 Therefore his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.”

John 9:24   So for the second time they called the man who had been blind and said to him, “Give glory to God. We know that this man is a sinner.” 25 He answered, “Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” 26 They said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” 27 He answered them, “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?” 28And they reviled him, saying, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. 29We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.” 30 The man answered, “Why, this is an amazing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. 31 We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will, God listens to him. 32 Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind. 33 If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” 34 They answered him, “You were born in utter sin, and would you teach us?” And they cast him out.

John 9:35   Jesus heard that they had cast him out, and having found him he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” 36 He answered, “And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?” 37 Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and it is he who is speaking to you.” 38 He said, “Lord, I believe,” and he worshiped him. 39 Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.” 40 Some of the Pharisees near him heard these things, and said to him, “Are we also blind?” 41 Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains.

Let me just say right up front that I really like this blind dude. He is the most practical man in the world. I’ve chosen to title this message The man who only knew one thing, because I think he holds tenaciously to just one thing, even as events and argument swirl around him. Perhaps they would have devoured a less practical or a more complex person.

In fact, I find everything about this passage unexpected and deeply human, starting with its first words. 

Apparently, Jesus didn’t go looking for this guy. He was ‘passing by’, the story tells us, and he saw a man born blind. Maybe if his disciples hadn’t had their strange interest in how the guy ended up blind from birth, we wouldn’t have this passage at all. But they were interested. And so, we do.

In part, I think I like the guy because people keep asking him questions for which he doesn’t have the answer. That happens to me all the time, and I sometimes get irritated by it just like he does.

But we differ, this man I’m charged with explaining this morning and I, in one very important detail. I’ve never been blind, at least not in his way. Until Jesus passed by, he’dnever had his sight.

I do remember waking up one morning as a kid and calling out, ‘Mom, I can’t open my eyes.’ I had what we called Pink Eye back then. Mom came running up the steps, got my eyes cleaned up, and in a few minutes I was back to my seeing self. But for those fifteen minutes or so, I realized there is an entirely different way to live. One in which you can’t see. One in which you have no light.

But as I’ve already suggested, here’s the thing I find most gripping about this guy in this story in this gospel of John: He only knows one thing.

Everybody else in the story seems to be obsessed with acquiring certainty about all sorts of things:

First, there’s that odd question the disciples ask when they see the blind guy, seemingly after having been informed that his blindness is not the result of illness or accident, but rather goes all the way back to his birth. I mean, the question presumes that they know this:

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

(Verse 2)

It doesn’t strike me as the most empathetic or sophisticated first question when you encounter a blind beggar along the road, but there it is. These are Jesus’ disciples. They come at us in all their unvarnished glory and they’re a whole lot like us. Or maybe we’re a lot like them.

More understandable to me is the debate among the neighbors in verse 8: 

The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar were saying, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?”

There’s some urgency to their question, by my lights. They really want to know whether the unthinkable has just happened—a blind man now sees—or whether this is fraud or just some really awkward misunderstanding. 

Then in verses 13-17, the Pharisees interrogate the guy with an apparent obsession for establishing the exact circumstances of his healing and whether the man who did this thing is ‘from God’ or ‘not from God’. Oddly, they seem more obsessed with the opinion of the man who’d had his sight restored than anything else. I mean, they’re the theological experts. Yet they press him, ‘What do you say about him, since he has opened your eyes.’

But this isn’t the end of their process. After all the Pharisees smell a rat, since it isn’t every day that a blind person suddenly sees. They call in the man’s parents and they grill them. The pressure they apply is intense, in a context where they had already made clear that any affiliating with Jesus would lead to being banned from the community’s principal gathering place, its synagogue. Anyone who hung with Jesus would be dis-membered from the community; the text three times calls it being ‘put out’ and ‘cast out’. It was a big deal and a thing to be feared.

In the shadow of this threat, all the parents can manage is the disingenuous suggestion that the Pharisees go back to their son and ask him for more clarity. 

‘He is of age…’, they offer up in verse 23, ‘…ask him.

Then the wheels come off from verse 24 on. The Pharisees insist that ‘we know this man is a sinner’. The exchange there is full of threats from the Pharisees and snarkiness from the formerly blind guy under the heat of the Pharisees’ need to know more.

And after the gloves have come off, the Pharisees do in fact expel him, maybe just from their council but almost certainly from the synagogue itself. Now he’s a total outsider to the community. Getting his sight back wasn’t a completely good thing, it would seem. It had consequences at the hands of people whose religiosity had them preferring blind guys over people healed on the Sabbath.

Everybody wants to know exactly what has happened here. Everybody seems to have an opinion. A lot seems to tilt on getting everybody’s answers lined up with the Pharisees ‘official’ version of events, even though verse 16 has allowed us to glimpse a lack of unanimity even among them: 

And there was a division among them.

Jesus is strangely absent from much of this. If the blind guy is the most practical man in the world, if he comes across as holding to just the one thing that he knows, Jesus’ behavior is really puzzling.

First, look at how he heals the dude. We’re familiar with how Jesus is drawn to human misery and suffering, how he esteems and elevates the outlier. So when his attention is drawn to a blind beggar, it doesn’t surprise us that he’s gonna’ engage and do something. Maybe we’d expect him to take the guy’s head in his hands and say, ‘Open your eyes!’. There’d be glory in that, and the signs in this book are all about revealing Jesus’ glory. Itt would be a great entrée to what Jesus does actually say about himself in his first encounter with the blind man: verse 5, ‘I am the light of the world.’

But that of course is not how things happen.

Instead, the action slows way down. 

Having said these things, (Jesus) spit on the ground and made mud with the saliva. Then he anointed the man’s eyes with the mud 7 and said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing.

Verses 6-7

And then, having done that thing that is described as something that has never been seen in all the world, Jesus goes somewhere else.

He doesn’t hang around for the arguments about the guy’s identity. He is not part of the theological debate about whether healing is to be permitted on the Sabbath. He is not present to defend himself when some of the Pharisees conclude that he just might be ‘from God’ and others declare that he most certainly is not. He does not counsel the man’s parents on how to survive their interrogation by the Jewish officials. He doesn’t console them after that trauma.

He is simply gone.

Maybe Jesus is off preaching the good news of his Father’s kingdom in another town. Maybe he’s liberating another village’s lunatic from a demon. Maybe he’s grinning as a man who has never walked rises up and dances in the street a village or two down the road. We don’t know.

But he’s not here.

And this man is left alone to deal with seeing neighbors and trees and sky and parents for the first time. Seeing light. He is seeing light. He is seeing his own body. But the ‘light of the world’ is not beside him, not holding his hand, not coaching him through his first days with eyes that function.

What does he do?

He holds to the one thing he knows. Let’s watch him…

First, we find him insisting that things are more simple than they are complicated. There’s that kerfuffle about whether he’s really the same guy who used to sit there and say, ‘A little help for a blind man…’ … ‘A little help for a blind man…’:

The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar were saying, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?” 9 Some said, “It is he.” Others said, “No, but he is like him.” He kept saying, “I am the man.”

Verses 8-9

He had to repeat it every time he was faced with the conspiracy version or the confusion version of events. Just two words in the Greek of John’s gospel, just four in the version I’ve read from this morning, just two again in what would be a perfectly good translation into our English: He kept saying, ‘It’s me.’

I have to wonder whether John intends us to see the humor in this, especially in the words that follow:

So they said to him, “Then how were your eyes opened?” 11 He answered, “The man called Jesus made mud and anointed my eyes and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ So I went and washed and received my sight.” 12 They said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I do not know.”

Verses 10-12

The language suggests that people asked him this over and over again, probably incredulous as they did. And that each time, he simply told them what Jesus had said, what he did, and what happened next.

My favorite part of this passage, for whatever it’s worth, is in those four words near the beginning of verse 11:

The man called Jesus…

The man has no theory, he has no Jesus theology, he just knows what happened and he narrates it in all its direct simplicity.

Then ‘Where is he’, and his stupendously simple response: ‘I don’t know.’


I love this guy. He’s the most practical man in the world. He only knows one thing, and it doesn’t include Jesus’ whereabouts or a complex theory about what it means to be Israel’s Christ, the nation’s messiah, or whether it was OK that he got his sight back on his people’s venerated holy day.

It’s this simplicity that generates a certain interpretation that clings to this passage that goes like this: ‘This guy is … well … simple’. That’s why the Pharisees call in a grown man’s parents, that’s why he can say ‘I don’t know’ on repeated occasions. 

I think this framing of our man is probably mistaken. I mean, his eventual tense exchange with the Pharisees is very gutsy and pretty articulate. But you can see where it comes from. He doesn’t seem to know very much. Everybody else does, thinks they do, or wants to.

When the Pharisees focus their resentment on the man, he finally does offer up a response to Jesus’ identity, in verse 17:

So they said again to the blind man, “What do you say about him, since he has opened your eyes?” He said, “He is a prophet.”

Now to my eyes, this is an evasive answer. Prophets don’t restore sight to the blind. It’s the least remarkable thing the man can say to survive the very unbalanced power dynamics of the moment. Remember, these are the Pharisees. And he is an illiterate, blind beggar, who has never seen a scroll in a day when Braille and then all the modern tools that bring unsighted people into the mainstream of our communities were still thousand years into the future.

This wasn’t fair.

So they summon his parents. That doesn’t really get them anywhere, so they call in the man himself a second time. Now the Pharisees are loaded for bear.

So for the second time they called the man who had been blind and said to him, “Give glory to God … (ominous words for the accused) … We know that this man is a sinner.” 25 He answered, “Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” 

There it is.

The one testimony they can’t twist. The one reality they can’t take away. The one thing he knows.

I was blind. Now I see.

They want more, they want a theory, they want to know Jesus’ technique, they want to find the crime, they are not accustomed to such a simple truth and will not have it on their watch. So things get a little feisty:

They said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” 27 He answered them, “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?” 28 And they reviled him, saying, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. 29 We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.” 30 The man answered, “Why, this is an amazing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. 31 We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will, God listens to him. 32 Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind. 33 If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” 34 They answered him, “You were born in utter sin, and would you teach us?” And they cast him out.

Verses 26-34

When they have come up empty, all they have left to spit out is the accusation that loomed behind the original question of the disciples, ‘Who sinned, this guy or his parents?’ They find their certainty and announce to this man that he was born in utter sin.

When all else fails, inform the victim that it’s his fault. That’s all they’ve got.

Word of the man’s banishment from the community finds its way to Jesus. He comes back onto our page. This time he doesn’t happen upon a man born blind, he seeks out a manwhose sight he has restored, though it has cost the man his place in the town where he was born and raised.

The man still only knows one thing, but Jesus is about to shape that knowledge into understanding. Into redemption. Into a life and a future for a man who has gained his sight but lost everything else because of Jesus’ touch.

Jesus is now gathering one of his lambs into his embrace.

Jesus heard that they had cast him out, and having found him he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” 36 He answered, “And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?” 37 Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and sit is he who is speaking to you.” 38 He said, “Lord, I believe,” and he worshiped him.

Verses 35-38

Have you noticed something strange about this man in this long passage that presents him to us, before he fades back into the shadows?

We never learn his name.

I believe there’s a reason for that. 

You see, this healing is one of Jesus’ signs. I believe John has taken care that we not end up reading this as a really cool thing that Jesus did to a certain guy once upon a time …. way back when.

By calling this one of Jesus’ signs, John is saying that this story … this anecdote … this testimony communicates how Jesus is and what Jesus does consistently. And so it says something about how Jesus’ followers experience him. Over and over again.

It allows us to join with this unnamed brother of ours … to stand beside him … and to say among the doubters and the accusers and the obsessive seekers of certainty … One thing I know. I was blind and now I see.

No one can take this from you. No one can refute your claim. No one can say convincingly, ‘you are deceived.’

This is not mindlessness. This is not anti-intellectualism. This is not escapism. Those things are all imposters that look a little like this, but they’re something entirely different.

This is the testimony of those who do not claim to see on our own. This is the foundation of the life for those who have been surprised by Jesus, the light of the world.

If this becomes our testimony, the one thing we know, it does have implications. If we see, then we see something. So what do we see in Jesus’ light?

  • We see that we were blind. That what we were living is not our intended condition. 
  • We see Jesus and we see by means of Jesus’ own light. We do not live and breathe via our own spiritual sophistication or insight.
  • We see that Jesus is capable of introducing us into a new, sighted reality, where things make sense … hold together … where things reflect our Father’s purpose. This is where theology and a Christian philosophy begin.
  • Because Jesus is the light of the world, we begin to see our world—illuminated by his light—as he does. Its goodness and its brokenness. Its promise and its tragedy. Its dancing and its groaning. Its eventual, glorious renewal.
  • We see that the power to give us back our sight is not ordinary. It comes from above. It’s an interruption of what we thought was normal when we were blind. We see that there is more to glimpse, discover, see. We become alive and alert to God’s purposes in his world. We see something of what he is up to. We rejoice in it, we join in with it. We invite others to abandon the darkness and come stand in the light of the world.

One thing we know. We were blind. Now we see.

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sequencing glory, anchoring light: Isaiah 60

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , , , , on November 28, 2022| Leave a Comment »

A Christian reading of the book called Isaiah should not occasion constant surprise. And yet it does.

Jesus is remembered quite famously as having told a Samaritan woman that ‘salvation is of the Jews’.

You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews (ε͗κ τῶν Ἰουδαίων).

John 4:22 (NRSV, emphasis and inserted Greek text added)

In context, the deep impression Jesus leaves upon this Samaritan woman’s neighbors belies the idea that non-Jews are excluded from the salvation in question. Yet the origins of this ’salvation’—humanly speaking—are hardly in doubt for the writer of the Fourth Gospel.

This assertion of a salvific sequence worth careful consideration is hardly an outlier. The New Testament’s most famous apostle, in the midst of one of his recurring wrestlings with the interrelationship of Jews and Gentiles in the economy of Jacob’s God, deploys a phrase that he will find useful more than once.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek (Ἰουδαίῳ τε πρῶτον καὶ Ἕλληνι).

Romans 1:16 (NRSV, emphasis and Greek text added)

Here the collective singular stands in twice for masses of people. Likely, this signals the apostle’s confidence that this is an ingrained way of things independent of human manipulation that plays itself out in individual cases over and over again.

It is all too easy to imagine that this soteriological sequencing somehow takes the place of a prior ingrained Jewish nationalism in early Christian proclamation, opening a door that had previously remained closed to non-Jews while assuring that the privilege of it not be understated. In fact, my students tell me all that the time that this is the way of things.

Yet this seems not to be the manner in which early Christian theologizers read their sources in the Hebrew Bible.

Rather, it seems that early Christian hermeneutics discovered this sequence—this anchoring of expansive salvation in Jewish particularity—in the massively influential book of Isaiah as well as in other Jewish texts. For example, Isaiah’s sixtieth chapter fixes its gaze and addresses its promise to the restored Zion that it imagines in some of the book’s most soaring and lyric poetry.

The turning of tables to Zion’s benefit is named late in the chapter:

The descendants of those who oppressed you shall come bending low to you, and all who despised you shall bow down at your feet; they shall call you the City of the LORD, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel.

Whereas you have been forsaken and hated, with no one passing through, I will make you majestic forever, a joy from age to age.

You shall suck the milk of nations, you shall suck the breasts of kings; and you shall know that I, the LORD, am your Savior and your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob.

Isaiah 60:14-16 (NRSV)

Yet this stirring reversal ought not be read as a transformation that occurs to the detriment of those nations that now nourish Zion.

Rather, the chapter’s opening verses address Zion lit up and glorified in a manner that attracts the peoples in the manner of secondary promise and sequenced blessing. The second-person singular addressee is most certainly the restored city.

Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you.

For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you.

Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.

Isaiah 60:1-3 (NRSV)

Passages like this steward the sequence and anchor the illumination of ‘the nations’ in a way that might easily have inspired, informed, and even shaped the New Testament proclamation of a Jesus movement that by appearances surprised itself at every turn by the response of non-Jews, then turned its hand to the hard work of how such ’new folks’ ought to be integrated into a family that began as a branch of Judaism.

Difficult times would come in that process which scholars often identify as ’the parting of the ways’. Yet it is both sobering and fascinating to observe the way in which early preachers and evangelists of the Jesus movement found themselves reading the Jewish Scriptures in a way that seems coherent even to (some) modern historians of the Way.

The stewards of those new wineskins that early Jewish followers of Jesus found necessary for the preservation of new wine did not, it turns out, imagine that everything had become something other than it had been. The vigor of their newfound regard for the risen Jesus led them back to old books like the one they called ‘Isaiah’, there to find the same sequencing of salvation, the very anchoring of light in YHWH’s disclosure to Israel itself that infused the teaching of their Lord and the writing of their apostles.

The notion that ‘salvation is from the Jews’ would be tested and often discarded in ensuing centuries, up to and including our own. Yet it seems difficult to this Christian reader of Isaiah to imagine that this sequence, this anchoring of ‘Jesus faith’ in Jewish experience can be discarded without inventing a new religion that is or will eventually become cast adrift from its moorings.

Dragons be there.

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polyvalent presence: John 12

Posted in textures, tagged , , , on December 8, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Perhaps we read bare privilege a little too easily into Jesus words. Perhaps, in our quest for honor, we lose the breadth of his presence.

If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him. (John 12:26 ESV)

The context John gives to this word is a somber one.

Indeed the words just previous speak of that death which is necessary in the Father’s strange design.

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. (John 12:24–25 ESV)

No blithe guarantees there.

Similarly the words that follow. Jesus finds his own next steps profoundly unsettling, even worthy of causing a total rethink.

Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. (John 12:27 ESV)

How then should we understand Jesus’ claim in verse 26 that ‘where I am, there will my servant be also’.

Abstracted from its context, it reads like a facile promise that the follower of Jesus will not become separated from his leader. There is, almost certainly, something of that in the statement.

But the follower of Jesus is not here addressed so much as an apprentice as he is engaged as a servant. In fact, the would-be servant of Jesus is rather warned of an obligation: he must go where Jesus goes. When we take the measure of the context, we catch more than a whiff of hard duty here. Indeed, Jesus next steps will take him precisely into the teeth of awful suffering, one from which he comes close to shrinking as he contemplates the horror of it.

It seems that Jesus’ word to his would-be servant here is at least principally a declaration of solidarity in unjust suffering as it is a prediction of Jesus’ own ubiquity in the life of the believer.

Yet the paradox of redemptive logic would have us choose not to reject the one in the recognition of the other.

For better or worse, we might conclude, we will be with Jesus and he with us.

Precisely here lies our plight, our predicament, our death, our glory.

 

 

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shame, sin, and freedom: John 8

Posted in logos, Uncategorized, tagged , , , on July 3, 2017| Leave a Comment »

David’s Community Bible Church

2 July 2017

 

Today we’ll look at one of the Gospel of John’s most beautiful stories. This story is about Jesus’ encounter with someone who truly needed his touch. I’m drawn to this chapter for the combination of tenderness and strength that is so much like Jesus. But I also love it because I, too, am lost without Jesus’ touch. And so, frankly are you. We all share something with this ‘woman taken in adultery’, as she’s often called.

Here’s how the passage reads:

Early in the morning (Jesus) came again to the temple. All the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst they said to him, ‘Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?’

This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him.

Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, ‘Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.’ And once more he bent down and wrote on the ground. But when they heard it, they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him.Jesus stood up and said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ She said, ‘No one, Lord.’ And Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.’ (John 8:2–11 ESV)

I want us to talk about three experiences. We’re all familiar with two of them. Most of us have experienced all three.

  • Shame
  • Sin
  • Freedom

Now it’s possible that you’ve never thought about ‘shame’ and ‘sin’ as two different things. But they are different.

In fact, people who study the way cultures work speak of two different kinds of cultures.

Shame cultures (or ‘honor/shame cultures’) are those in which people suffer most from the disapproval and contempt that their actions bring on them. People in shame cultures don’t entirely dismiss the idea of objective righteousness and sin as a falling short of that standard. But what wrenches at their hearts and beats them down is the sense of shame that comes from having failed or having been thought to fail. And what raises them up is being respected …  honored.

Law cultures (‘forensic cultures’) are those in which people speak more easily about sin than about shame. They speak the language of guilt and righteousness and are less comfortable thinking about, talking about, or even feeling shame as the deepest reality in their lives. What raises them up is forgiveness … knowing that their law-breaking is no longer held against them.

In the US, we have traditionally been a law culture. We speak of the rule of law and are given to classifying people as law-abiding or law-breaking. People are either innocent or guilty. We don’t worry as much about what they feel.

Now I wonder if you’ve observed a shift between those of us are, say, 40 years old or older …. and those who are younger than 40. Maybe you think the younger ones among us seem to belong to an honor-shame culture more than to a law culture. If you have that idea in your head, you’re not alone. Many culture-watchers would say that we are in fact undergoing that kind of shift. We’re becoming less like Germans and more like Italians. We’re less concerned about law or righteousness as an objective standard that ought to be upheld no matter what we feel about it … and more concerned about how people feel, whether someone has been humiliated or excluded … or shamed.

One of the things I love about Jesus’ encounter with this woman in John 8 is that he seems to deal with both shame and guilt. As he does so, I think he says that both kinds of culture … both kinds of people … both ends of the spectrum of our experience as human beings are important. Both are redeemable. Most importantly: we can be freed from both shame and sin.

Now I need to take a little detour here for a minute, so bear with me:

If you’re an especially sharp-eyed reader or if you have a Bible that calls your attention to this sort of thing, you may have noticed that this short passage floated around for quite a few years before it found its eventual home in the Gospel of John.  These verses don’t appear in our very earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of John. They do show up in a few manuscripts of the Gospel of Luke. And then, finally, they come to rest in their current location at the beginning of the Gospel of John, where I think they fit so beautifully as a real-life example of Jesus’ teaching about forgiveness.

I want to say just a few words about this in order not to leave anybody hanging:

First of all, this kind of thing is very, very unusual. Our manuscript evidence for the books of the Bible is so solid and indisputable that this kind of uncertainty almost never occurs.

Second, there’s nothing to worry about in this. Most scholars who study this kind of thing say that this passage has all the earmarks of a genuine encounter of Jesus with this woman. It’s hard to say why it had to struggle to find its home here in the Gospel of John.

I like to think of the passage itself as suffering some of the same un-belonging that this woman must have felt as she was dragged into this very public humiliation and then eventually abandoned to the care of Jesus’, her merciful rescuer.

Now let’s talk about an unfortunate woman’s shame.

Jesus challenged the religion and the religious leaders of his time in many ways. But no challenge rose higher than his insistence on showing mercy to those who had been most shoved aside by the mainstream. The Old Testament tells us that ‘the LORD draws near to the broken-hearted’.

Jesus certainly did so. He saw right through appearances. He was no respecter of persons. He recognized the point at which piety and spirituality actually push people away from God rather than drawing them towards Him. He knew the hypocrisies and the half-truths that sometimes seem as though they flourish much better in religious soil than they do in other places.

And no one pushed back against Jesus and his teaching more than the men whom the gospels call ‘the scribes and the Pharisees’. These guys were the custodians of the faith and of the people, as nobody else was.

Now let’s not be too quick to write off these ‘scribes and Pharisees’ as the miserable, rotten people they often sound like. The Pharisees grew out of a movement that had paid a very high price for standing form against all kinds of political and religious compromise back in the day. And the teachers of the Law had studied long and hard to master the deep truths of God. They weren’t lazy bums. They were diligent. They cared. They wanted their children to grow up in a culture that honored God and that walked in the ancient paths.

But, you know, our zeal is never enough. Sometimes we who are closest to the truths of God find ourselves wanting to master God rather than to be mastered by him. We come to place where it’s no longer possible for God to surprise us because we’ve possessed him. We’ve domesticated him. We know all sorts of things about him. But we don’t know Him and are no longer undone by how good and gracious and demanding he is. And then we become an obstacle that stands between God and people who would really like to know Him.

This is what happened to too many of the scribes and Pharisees. So Jesus was not welcome among them. He was a threat.

When the scribes and Pharisees bring this woman to Jesus, verse 6 tells us that they did this ‘to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him’.

So here they come … and here she comes.

The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery.” John 8:3–4 ESV)

She’s been caught in the very act of adultery. Imagine her shame. Who knows if they even allowed her to throw something over her body, to cover herself up.

There’s a crowd of people with Jesus, listening to his teaching, learning from him, becoming his disciples.

This crowd of religious officials bullies in and they place this woman in the midst of everybody. They text doesn’t even tell us her name. I think it withholds that information intentionally, as a way of signaling that this woman … this human being … had been reduced to a legal case study … She’s an object lesson to them, not a human being who needs redeeming. She has no name.

A few minutes before, she had been in the embrace of her lover. Misguided as her love might have been, maybe she felt loved there, cared for. Maybe she was finally finding some tenderness.

We sometimes collapse this story with others that suggest she was a serial adulterer or even a prostitute. But the text says nothing to suggest that. Likely she was a normal woman, maybe a lonely one, and—dishonest and damaging as her act might have been—she was experiencing some affection.

And then suddenly here she is, in the midst of a crowd … embarrassed … shamed … condemned.

Can you imagine the shame … ?

What are her thoughts: ‘Even if I get out of this alive … and I may not … where do I go from here? I have no more secrets. I’ve lost my dignity. Everybody is staring at me … and scowling.’

Now, before we go any farther, one question hangs over this scene. At least in my mind it does, and maybe in yours too.

Maybe the guy was faster on his feet than the woman was, and got away. Or maybe the hypocrisy of this woman’s accusers is evident in the man’s absence. Maybe they let him go. Maybe he was one of the boys. Maybe they could sweep his cheating on his wife under the rug.

‘But this woman …’, you can almost hear them saying, ‘… we’ll make an example of her, and we’ll trap this Jesus along with her.’

Have you ever felt utterly alone? Abandoned?

This woman, in this terrible, public, shameful moment … certainly feels that way. And, as far as anybody knows, she should. She’s got no one to stand up for her. There’s no fairness in this, no dignity in this, no mercy in this.

Many of us live with shame, so this woman may not seem so different than what we know.

There are two kinds of shame you know:

  • There is shame for something you have done or someone you have been. This kind of shame flows from our own sin. It’s a step beyond regret, and you see it in the eyes of people who know the thing they’ve done or the things they haven’t done and they wonder how it ever got this way. But there’s no going back. You can see it in their eyes.
  • Then there is shame that is bred into us. Some of us feel shame even though it doesn’t flow from some real sin in our lives. If you’ve come from a home with a domineering parent or a family where other dysfunctions ran really deep or suffered abuse at an early age, you may feel that this second kind of shame is far too familiar to you. Everything’s not your fault, but it sure does feel like it is.

Whatever its cause, shame is debilitating. It traps us. It becomes a dark story and we live in that story, never quite able to escape its darkness. We long to be free, but the shame is stronger than we are. It keeps us from responding with joy to God’s calling on our lives. It keeps us from reaching out in joy and concern to others, keeps us from focusing on others rather than on our own darkness.

Shame is a cage.  A really frustrating, trapping, debilitating cage.

I bet you know something about shame. I do. Most of us do, sooner or later

But this woman was not only suffering shame. She was also caught in the act of one of the most awful of sins: awful because it involves the shattering of marriage promises by one or by both of the people involved. The Bible understands adultery as sexual relations outside of marriage when at least one of the participants is married. The Germans call it Ehebruch or marriage-breaking, because that’s exactly what it is. This woman was not merely a victim. She was a sinner.

It all adds up for Jesus’ adversaries to being the perfect trap.

They know Jesus is stern with them … and off-the-charts merciful with the weak and the needy. But it’s hard to book a guy for mercy.

But they also know that Jesus honors their Scripture. And they think they can trap him between his own mercy and the Scripture’s severity.

That would be their opening to get rid of this very popular Jesus once and for all:

Now in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say? (John 8:5 ESV)

It’s worthwhile, when the New Testament quotes the Old Testament, to look back to the verses that are being quoted. Here are the passages from the Law of Moses that are most likely in their minds:

If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death. (Leviticus 20:10 NRSV)

If a man is caught lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman as well as the woman. So you shall purge the evil from Israel. (Deuteronomy 22:22 NRSV)

So Jesus’ adversaries have a strong point.

What will Jesus’ do?

This is where this passage slows waaaay down … and becomes very mysterious.

Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, ‘Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.’ And once more he bent down and wrote on the ground. But when they heard it, they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. (John 8:6–9)

What do you think Jesus wrote in the dust? Wouldn’t you love to know?

I have no idea why the gospel writer withheld from us the details about what Jesus wrote.

All kinds of theories have been offered about what those words in the dust might have said.

The truth is, we simply … don’t … know.

And the fact that we don’t know puts our focus back on what we do know: the words of Jesus that were not written in the sand but rather were spoken to this woman’s accusers and recorded in the Gospel of John:

Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.

Now I have a question for every follower of Jesus in this room:

Having known the grace and forgiveness of Jesus, how could we ever entertain a judgmental spirit in our hearts. How could we ever allow un-grace to creep in and poison our relationships? How could forgiveness and restoration ever fail to be our deepest desire when there is sin and shame in those who walk along beside us?

Now Jesus and this anonymous woman are left alone.

Probably for the first time in this whole sad calamity, someone looks her in the eyes and speaks to her. It’s Jesus, of course, who does so.

Jesus stood up and said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’

She said, ‘No one, Lord.’

And Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.’ (John 8:10–11 ESV)

Is there a more poignant, more moving question anywhere in Scripture than this?: Does no one condemn you?

 Notice that Jesus removes from this woman two terrible burdens:

First, he takes away the terrible burden of her public shame. He restores her to dignity in the sight of other people, for none are left who condemn her.

But then he also speaks as the Incarnate Lord who wields an authority that belongs only to God: to forgive sin.

He assures her that he himself does not condemn her. Yet this does not mean that sin does not matter, that adultery is a trivial thing, that our actions don’t have consequences. Jesus stays very far from that conclusion. Having forgiven her, his last recorded words to her are ‘From now on sin no more.’

Honestly, it’s hard for me to decide which message this amazing passage brings to Christian people most powerfully.

Are we meant to hear in this how utterly unthinkable it is for us, having been forgiven just like this woman by the sheer mercy of Jesus, that we should be judgmental, condemning people? People who classify other human beings as better or worse depending on the kind of sin in which they’ve indulged and forgetting our own?

Is it a message about how we should live towards those who are trapped in shame and even in sin? With mercy, as Jesus addressed this woman?

Are we the scribes and Pharisees, who need to watch Jesus writing in the sand and then hear his biting, liberating words, ‘Is there anyone here without sin? If so, you go first … Go ahead, throw your stones.’

Maybe. And maybe that’s what your heart and mine need to hear this morning.

Or is the main message to us as those who become trapped in shame and sin?

Maybe we’re not the scribes and the Pharisees. Maybe we’re more like this woman, caught in a family-bashing sin, a light shone upon her own personal evil … discovering that in Jesus there is forgiveness and freedom from our shame … and from our sin.

Maybe that’s the main message for us this morning.

We have fine pastors and trusted elders in this congregation, and I know that if you’ve been trapped in that cage and would like to begin your break from it this morning, any of us would be delighted to talk with you about that.

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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What have you done? John 18

Posted in textures, tagged , , on May 30, 2017| Leave a Comment »

As power encounters go, this one has no peer.

So Pilate entered his headquarters again and called Jesus and said to him, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’ Jesus answered, ‘Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?’ Pilate answered, ‘Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered you over to me. What have you done?‘ (John 18:33–35 ESV)

If the biblical presentation is to be believed, the Maker of worlds stood before one cynical, beleaguered official of a particularly influential tribe that would in its turn slump into obscurity. (more…)

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por invitación: ¿A quién iremos … ? La confrontación en Juan, capítulo 6 (Alexander Cabezas Mora)

Posted in por invitación, tagged , on March 17, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Jesús se caracterizó por su dureza al tratar con el liderazgo religioso de su tiempo. En cambio, con sus seguidores y con el pueblo fue un pastor compasivo y tierno. Aunque hubo ocasiones en las que también fue enérgico, sobre todo con aquellos que actuaban al calor de las emociones. Por ejemplo, ante el milagro de la multiplicación de los panes y los peces, sus seguidores reaccionaron de forma sensacionalista con el deseo de entronizarlo. El Señor les iba a mostrar qué clase de reinado buscaba establecer, más allá de las  pretensiones asistencialistas y políticas que demandaban esos seguidores. (more…)

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