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John Message 8
New Life from God through Jesus
John 5:18-5:48
Recently I had a conversation with one of the guys who attends Peace and among the things that John and I have in common is that we both have suffered a life-threatening illness … in his case, a stroke caused by a hole in his heart that he had since birth but never knew about. We talked about how our respective experiences have heightened our appreciation for the gift of life. Yet I also realize that this kind of awareness and gratitude will help but does not necessarily guarantee that John and I will live our lives to their fullest. It’s what almost every person wants in his or her heart of hearts … to not just exist but to truly live. But in American society today there is great confusion on this issue. Who is to say what is truly a good life? While we can say with some certainty that living the “high life” will not result from drinking a particular beer, given the vast array of individual differences, who is to say what the path is to the good and rich life?
Well … as startling as it was to his first listeners, and even more outrageous to modern ears, Jesus claims to know what it means to really “live.” In fact, he claims to be the source of genuine life. Turn with me to John chapter 5 beginning at verse 17. If you were here last week, the focus was on a couple of Jesus’ miracles, the second of which was the healing of an invalid man. Instead of celebrating this, the Jewish authorities came after Jesus because he had done this “miracle work” on the Sabbath day … which was to be a day of rest, not of work.
Jesus responds in this way: “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working.” In the Creation account of Genesis, God had rested from his creative work on the seventh day, establishing a pattern for us that six days of work each week is enough; that our life rhythm needs a day for rest and renewal. But this does not mean that the ancients thought that God took every Saturday off from tending to the universe. Jewish teachers knew that God was at work even on the Sabbath Day providing for people’s needs, communicating his truth through his Word, and yes, healing. So Jesus tells his persecutors that he is simply doing what God has always done.
Jesus’ Keynote Address
That only further angered them: “For this reason the Jews tried all the harder to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God. Jesus gave them this answer: “I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.”
It’s no wonder that one writer calls this the beginning of Jesus’ keynote address as he helps us understand his mission as fully human, yet divine ambassador, the source of his authority, the nature of the Trinity, and our own calling as Christ-followers. First of all, Jesus the God-man lived in complete submission to the will of God the Father. One writer states, “In this expression of humility, obedience, and dependence we see the (Jewish) version of the ideal son, since a son is to reproduce his father’s thought and action.” (Whiteacre) In the next chapter, Jesus will reiterate, “For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me.” [John 6:38 (NIV)] It was Jesus’ total purpose to fulfill the divine mission which would ultimately take him to the cross as a sacrifice for our sins. It was God the Father’s plan that his Son become a human being, display divine compassion and power through healings and demonic deliverance, communicate divine truth, and then suffer and die in our place. Jesus would submit himself to the Father’s plan even if it meant the horror of the cross. As he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, “… not my will, but yours be done.” [Luke 22:42] Thus Jesus did what we are unable to do, live in full obedience to God’s plan.
Secondly, Jesus has gained his authority, his authorization as divine ambassador, from God the Father. He was not a false usurper of divine status. As he states in verses 26-27, he has been given authority by God the Father to give life and in the end to pass judgment on humankind. He is God the Father’s agent of hope and deliverance.
Thirdly, Jesus as God the Son and member of the Trinity is fully aligned with God the Father in their saving work. It’s not as if God the Father has one agenda of being an angry Judge while God the Son is the one who is compassionate and merciful and the Holy Spirit is challenging and motivating. The Trinity does not work at cross-purposes. They are three, but they are one. Augustine likens the Father to a flame, with Jesus the Son being the light, and to that we might add that the Holy Spirit as the heat. They are together fully engaged in the same work and that work is to give us life. Jean Vanier writes, “The work of God is life, to give, sustain and call forth life every day and every moment” … more on that in a bit.
Finally, for those of us who claim to follow Jesus, it is our calling not to do our own thing but rather to seek to know the will of God and to do it. This is a radically counter-cultural approach to life for it would suggest that God knows what is best for our lives and that real life is not found primarily in recreation, entertainment, or material possessions, but rather in a life that by serving others is life-giving.
Jesus goes on … we’ll pick it up in verse 20: “For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. Yes, to your amazement he will show him even greater things than these. For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it.” [John 5:20-21 (NIV)] “I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life. I tell you the truth, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself.” [John 5:24-26 (NIV)]
Jesus is “Life”
The concept of “life” is central to John’s Gospel but it is never carefully defined … perhaps because it will always contain a sense of mystery as we seek to discover the life God intends us individually and as families. What we do have is Jesus giving himself as the ultimate individual example of a well-lived life (what the Greeks would have called a good bios), and then presenting himself as the source of life for all people (what the Greeks called zoe). The Gospel’s message is that we will all have a bios (an individual story and way of life) but without Jesus’ zoe, without a life-giving relationship with him, we can’t live to our divine potential.
Let’s work backwards in this section. In verse 26, Jesus claims to have “life in himself.” This is ultimately a claim to divine status because ordinary life is dependent on others. Take this bulb garden we’ve had around for this series. It is life very much dependent upon human beings to plant it and to water it … but of course, we’re really not in that much control in that while by our neglect we could cause this garden to die, we aren’t really capable of creating this life. We are dependent on the bulbs, seeds, and soil to bring forth flowering plants. Or take our own lives … we were, of course dependent upon our parents as the source of life … but even they weren’t exactly “in control” of sperm and egg coming together, of cell division and embryo gestation and all that goes into the astounding process of creating new life. Nor are we in that much control now … in that we can take life but we really can’t keep our hearts beating or nervous system working properly and on it goes. Most importantly, when someone is dead, we can’t bring them back. In Jesus’ words, we don’t have life in ourselves.
Jesus, however, claims to possess such life by which he means that he has the power to give life. In the preceding verse, he states that this power will be displayed at the end of time when he will raise the dead [John 5:25]. It is the power that is being displayed now, as in verse 24, Jesus proclaims that by trusting in him, people are being brought from death to life [John 5:24]. By this he is referring to the zoe (the life) that really matters … and that is to have a relationship with God that will transform us in this life and carry on with perfect joy for all eternity. And Jesus is very clear that our response to him is crucial to our receiving or spurning his life: “ … whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life.” [John 5:24 (NIV)]
Why do we need Jesus’ life to really live? Elsewhere in the New Testament the human predicament is made clear … we’re dead. The Apostle Paul tells his readers, “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins …” [Ephes. 2:1 (NIV)] Our sin, our moral failures, our disobedience to God’s will, have cut us off from God and from his zoe. As such, we may physical life (a bios), but we are spiritually dead and that is the most tragic kind of dead. That’s a death of divinely-given purpose, meaning, hope, wisdom, peace, security, etc. in our lives. It is a life without the joy and power of a deep God-connection. Or as I might put, it is mere existence without being fully alive.
Back to verse 21, Jesus the one who possesses life now “gives life to whom he is pleased to give it.” [John 5:21] He gives us that life as he reaches out to us and enables us to trust in him as our Savior. He gives us that life as he forgives our sins so that they are no longer a barrier between us and God. He gives us that life as he allows us to experience the many benefits that flow from a vital relationship with God. He gives us that life as he invites us to follow him onto the kind of extraordinary path that is aligned to God’s perfect plan. It is life that is still imperfect and partial now … and perhaps because of that, one that those of us who have been Christians for a while fail to appreciate (or even pursue). Yet as those who have gone their own way for a while can attest, it is what Jesus called “life in abundance.” [John 10:10]
[Jeremy Goss’ testimony]
What “Life” Looks Like
What strikes me about Jeremy’s story is that it is a fairly typical one spiritually for Eau Claire folks … the average person here has grown up with some church experience but not a lot clicked spiritually … if anything there was a lot of fear of judgment with regard to God with little joy (and if that’s what a relationship with God is like, who would want it?). Then the person gets into his or her late teens and 20’s and drifts. Lots of important life decisions are made in those years and people trying to do it all on their own too often make their share of bad decisions … as Jeremy described them in his life. But my experience has been that unless those decisions have resulted in sufficient pain and negative consequences, most folks drift along without really knowing what their missing. They would describe their lives as OK and they don’t yet have a vision for what their life could become in Jesus.
I would suggest that it takes on some of the remarkable nature of Jesus’ life:
1) not driven by fear but embraced by God’s love: Jesus notes that he is loved and we too can know that we matter to God, that he treasures our lives as his children. [John 5:20]
2) not blind to life’s central purposes but able to see and grasp what God is up to in our world and know that God is inviting us to share in his work. We don’t have the level of clarity Jesus enjoyed as the Son of God, but as we seek God, he will increasingly turn on the light of spiritual perception and understanding. [John 5:20]
3) not autonomous and therefore alone in facing life’s challenges but dependent upon God and empowered to share in his mission to the world [John 5:19; see also John 15]
4) not selfishly living for personal pleasure but being “life-giving” as we carry out our work and invest our lives in others. [John 5:21] While we aren’t the ultimate source of life as Jesus is, we get the amazing opportunity to be his channels of life to others.
That’s the kind of life that Jesus is inviting you into as he is inviting you to do life with him … to live life in a deepening relationship with one who is Life. Stephen Curtis Chapman, songwriter, writes of it this way, “This is life like no other … this is the great adventure.”
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