So That

John 20:30-31

February 14, 2018 (Ash Wednesday) • Mount Pleasant UMC

I love a good book. I know there are lots of advantages to eBooks, and I have quite a few of them on my iPad, but I still love an actual, physical book. I guess I’m old fashioned that way! My two favorite moments of reading a book, though, are starting a new book and finishing a book. I love the sense of anticipation that comes with cracking open a brand new book, one I’ve never read before, and discovering what’s between the covers. And I love that moment when I finish a book—not only because of the sense of accomplishment I feel, but because it means I get to start another new book! It’s a vicious cycle for a bookaholic! Sometimes, I have to confess, I get so antsy to get to the end that I might hurry through a few pages or even skip to the end to see how things come out. I know, I know, that’s not the way the author intended the book to be read, but sometimes I find (at least in my life) that knowing the end from the beginning helps me enjoy the story a little bit more.

This Lenten season, we’re going to take a fresh look at the person and character of Jesus, the one who stands at the heart of our Christian faith, and we’re going to do that through a study of the Gospel of John. John was, after all, one of Jesus’ best friends and one of his closest disciples. By the time John writes his gospel, he is quite aged, a living legend who has lived longer than most people in his day did. He has been through exile and back and has settled down in the city of Ephesus, in modern-day Turkey. He has spent his life teaching and preaching and telling others about his friend Jesus, and now, as he nears the end of that life, he puts ink to paper in order to tell the story his way (cf. Card, John: The Gospel of Wisdom, pg. 13). He most certainly knows about Matthew, Mark and Luke, and so he doesn’t repeat very much of what is in those earlier Gospels. Rather, John sets out to tell the story in his own way, a unique way, and to sort of “fill in the gaps” of the story as it has been set down up until now. Not that he tells everything; the Gospels, after all, are not biographies in the sense that we think of them (cf. Barclay, The Gospel of John, Volume 2, pg. 279). They don’t tell every event in Jesus’ life, nor do they necessarily tell everything in exact chronological order. That’s not what they set out to do. John, in particular, has a very distinct purpose in writing what he does, a purpose he shares near the end of his book. If we’re going to really understand what the Gospel of John is all about, we have to start at the end, because that’s where John tells us his “so that.”

Knowing the “so that” of any endeavor is vitally important. It answers the question, “Why did you do that?” So that…what? Viktor Frankl, out of his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp, developed his psychotherapy method out of observations he made during that time of suffering. He wrote it this way in his seminal book Man’s Search for Meaning: “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how.’” Frankl noticed that those who had a reason to live often outlasted those who saw no purpose in life. Rick Warren capitalized on that same idea in his best-selling book The Purpose-Driven Life. We need a “so that.” We were made to have a purpose. And John, after a lifetime of preaching and teaching about Jesus, tells us he has come to possess a very clear purpose for his life and for his writing. You heard this verse a few moments ago, but let’s hear it again so we’re clear on why John wrote what he did: “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (20:31).

Now, that purpose statement is preceded by what author Michael Card calls “one of the most frustrating verses in the Bible” (Card 209). I agree with him. John tells us that there a whole lot of other things Jesus did and said that have not been written down, and when I read that, I immediately find myself frustrated. I’m a bit of a completionist. I’m the guy who buys the Blu-ray partially so that I can see the deleted scenes. Most of the time I don’t care about the documentaries or the audio commentary, but I like to see the deleted scenes, to have the whole story so to speak. So I wish there was another Gospel with the “deleted Jesus scenes,” but there isn’t. By telling us that, though, what John really means to say is, “I know I could have written a lot more, but the things I have told you in this Gospel are sufficient to accomplish my purpose. You now have everything you need to make up your mind, to find what I hoped you would find when I first started writing.”

And what is it he hoped we would find? Two things, in particular. First of all, John wants us to believe that Jesus is the Messiah. And while, for most of us here tonight most likely, that’s familiar language, many folks around us today have no idea what that phrase means. The word John uses for “believe” has a sense of entrusting something to someone. I think about it this way: when the kids were born, Cathy and I had several conversations about what would happen to them if something happened to us. Most if not all parents have had to have that conversation. Who will raise your kids if you’re not there anymore? Who will you ask to be those folks who are sometimes called “godparents”? It’s not an easy decision, because it requires you to have complete trust and faith in the other person, that they would raise your kids the way you would want. You have to believe in that other person. That’s the sense John is getting at here. He wants us to take our most treasured possession—our life—and allow Jesus to have it, to control it, to take care of it. It’s like we take our life and place it in Jesus’ hands, asking him to be our caretaker. That’s what it means to believe. Belief is not just mental assent or saying, “Yeah, I know that it’s true.” Belief is not a matter of the head; it’s a matter of the heart. It’s a matter of trust, of entrusting what we value the most to someone else. And we can do that, John says, because Jesus is the Messiah. Again, that’s not a word a lot of people use today. “Messiah” (Hebrew) or “Christ” (Greek) or “Savior” (English)—all of those words mean “anointed one.” The Messiah is the “set-apart one.” “Christ” is not Jesus’ last name; it is his title, his calling, his function. Jesus is the one God has set apart to carry God’s saving mission into the world. Jesus is the hope for the world, the only hope for us to be able to be who God made us to be. That can happen, John says, when we trust Jesus with our lives, when we “believe.”

That belief, John says, leads to “life in his name.” Now, there are three different words for “life” in the Bible, and sort of like the four different words for “love,” which word you use determines what kind of life you really mean. (The English language is so boring by contrast!) The word bios refers to, as you might guess, biological life, physical life. It’s where we get the word “biology,” which refers to the study of physical stuff. The second word is psuche, from which we get the word “psyche” or “psychology,” so as you can assume, it refers to the life of the mind, the soul, the emotions. This is the kind of “life" my wife deals with in people every day. But John doesn’t use either one of those words here. The word he chooses to use is zoe, which refers not so much to quantity of life as it does to the quality of life. And by “quality” I’m not talking about feeling good or being alert. Zoe is often translated as “eternal life,” but when we hear that phrase, we usually think of the life after this life, the one that goes on forever. But here’s the thing: “eternal life” or zoe doesn’t begin at the moment of our death. It begins, hopefully, long before that, when we enter into relationship with Jesus. We give God too little credit when we act like and live like he only cares about the life after this one. God is concerned about this life, too, and not just for the purpose of getting us “saved.” He wants us to believe in Jesus so that we can enjoy a new quality of life—in this life and the life after this one. Eternal life is life now, life lived in Jesus’ presence, life entrusted to and held by Jesus’ hands.

By simply thinking of eternal life, zoe, as something that only comes after our death, we make it too small a thing. We think of eternal life as the “reward” we get when we die, but death is not something that happens to us at the end of our life. The Bible says death is something we are born with, a disease (if you will) that will eventually kill us. Since the Garden of Eden, we have been people haunted by and infiltrated with death. Why do you think so much of our time, resources and energy are spent trying to extend our physical life by a few months or years? We’re haunted by death because we know, in the deepest part of our souls, that we were not created for death. Our souls remember Eden. And so Jesus came to bring zoe, to bring life eternal—not just life forever, but life that remakes us into people who manifest the presence of God in the world. We become who we were meant to be: the image of God in the world. Jesus came to give us not just life, but life abundant (cf. John 10:10). “This is the testimony,” John wrote in one of his letters. “God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life” (1 John 5:11-12). It’s that simple, and that profound (Walt, This Is How We Know, pgs. 116-121).

Eternal life is frustratingly slow to arrive, however. Transformation takes time, and sometimes we resist it. One of the most profound moments I’ve had in almost twenty-five years of ministry happened when a former youth group member came and visited us at our home. We had been gone from that church for a few years, and he came to see us, to let us know we were missed and to catch up. In the midst of the conversation, he stopped and said to me, “You know, I was a real jerk sometimes at youth group, and I’m sorry for that. I want you to know that I get it now. I should have listened better then, but I get it now.” And we’re Facebook friends, so I’m still able to watch his growth into the life that really is life. We live in the microwave culture. We want instant change, momentary incredible transformations, but in my experience, that’s not the way it normally happens. The death that we are born with inside of us has an incredibly tight grasp on us and doesn’t give up easily. Eternal life take time to grow, but it is what Jesus is doing in you, even when you can’t see it. He came so that we would believe and by believing be given life.

So if life is the promise and the goal we’re pursuing, if eternal life is what Jesus came to bring, why do we start with ashes on this night? Why, at the beginning of this holy season, are we preparing to mark our foreheads with a symbol of death? In part it’s because in the Bible ashes are a sign of mourning. People who had lost loved ones would pour ashes over their head as a sign of sadness; Job, in the Old Testament, sits in the ashes when he loses everything (cf. Job 2:8). There is still a line in the often-used committal service at the graveside that says, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” even though we don’t sprinkle ashes on the casket anymore. Ashes were and are a sign of mourning, and in the history of the church, wearing ashes became a sign of mourning our sins. The Lenten season is about putting aside our sin so that we might know Jesus better. So that’s at least part of it.

But here’s the other thing: the Christian faith is always about turning the world upside down, or maybe turning it right-side up. Where the world sees life, then death, the Christian faith proclaims that out of death comes life. Hope comes out of hopelessness, and the worst thing is never the last thing. This whole season, from tonight all the way to Pentecost, is a way of proclaiming that truth. We start in ashes, and then we make our way to Easter, where the light begins to shine. Then, a few weeks later, we arrive at Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples and empowered them to carry out the mission Jesus gave them (cf. Acts 2). And do you remember what the symbol of Pentecost is? Fire. Something that looked like tongues of fire rested on each head on that first day of Pentecost. And so, in Lent and Easter, we go from ashes to fire. Life out of death. Light out of darkness, as John says in the very beginning of his Gospel: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5). That’s what this season is all about. Tonight, we start in ashes and allow anticipation to build so that we can truly understand and welcome the new life that comes in the resurrection at Easter and the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Tonight, we begin to receive what Jesus came to give and we embrace it more each day as we move toward the fire.

But what about the tradition of giving something up for Lent? That’s meant as a spiritual discipline of sacrifice, reminding us that believing so that we receive life is not an easy journey. It requires sacrifice, giving up some of what is most dear to us. Sometimes we treat it as a joke; when I was in seminary, I always tried giving up studying for Lent. That did not go over well with my professors, many of whom suggested to us as students we might want to embrace a newer discipline: taking something on for Lent, adding a new spiritual discipline to our lives. Either way we go, though, both actions require sacrifice, which is appropriate. Lent should require something from us. Discipleship should require something from us. Whatever we do should push us, stretch us so that we can grow more into the likeness of Jesus. After all, that’s the purpose of this season, and John says that’s the purpose for which Jesus came. We come tonight to begin this holy season of Lent so that, as we journey with Jesus, we can experience, embrace and enjoy the life that really is life.