How Can You Believe?

How Can You Believe?

John 5:31-47

June 14, 2020 • Mount Pleasant UMC

I’m not sure I remember how to do this! The last time I stood behind this pulpit was March 15—amazingly, almost three months to the day. The last twelve weeks has been challenging, to say the least. The staff will tell you that, in the days leading up to March 15, we were being told that this coronavirus pandemic might last eight weeks, and I scoffed at that. No way we would be out of the worship center for eight weeks! And I was right—we weren’t out for eight weeks, we were out for twelve weeks! So you’ll forgive me if I’m a little rusty up here this morning.

In these last twelve weeks, where we’re rarely if ever seen each other, if we’ve connected at all it’s probably been on a little computer application called Zoom that very few of us had heard of three months ago. In these last twelve weeks, many things have changed. Many summer events have been cancelled. Many activities have been postponed. Some businesses have closed for good. We’ve got new terms like “social distancing” to add to our vocabulary. We’ve nervously watched as the economy has gone up and down; some of us have lost jobs and others of us have lost loved ones. The effects of this season aren’t all felt yet; I’m certain in the months to come, we’ll discover more and more the way this invisible virus that we’ve labeled COVID-19 has changed the way we live, the way we think—maybe even the way we believe. But, friends, none of this has taken God by surprise. God is still on the throne. God is not shaken; he alone knows how the story ends. God is still good, and the worst thing is still not the last thing.

This morning, we’re continuing this series called “Questions Jesus Asks,” looking at a very few of the many questions Jesus asked those who were around him. As I said last week, Jesus asked more questions than he answered, and he rarely directly answered anything he asked or that was asked of him. I’ve done a lot of thinking about that, and wonder if that might be a model Jesus is trying to lay out for us, especially in these times where people are lonely, hunkered down, and in the midst of racial tension. Maybe we should be asked more questions rather than constantly giving answers. Anyway, this morning, we find ourselves with Jesus in Jerusalem as he heals a long-term invalid and finds himself, once again, in an argument with the religious leaders.

So, at the beginning of this chapter, Jesus is attending one of the religious festivals in Jerusalem. It’s interesting that John (who is usually very detailed) doesn’t think we need to know which one; it’s not really important to the story he is telling. While Jesus is there, he runs into a man who has been an invalid for thirty-eight years. Thirty-eight years. That’s 70% of my life! We don’t know how old this man was, but for thirty-eight of his years, he’s been sick. And for who knows how long, he’s been coming to this place, to the Pool of Bethesda. In Hebrew that’s “Beth” (which means house) and “hesed,” which is a word I’ve taught you before that’s hard to translate with just one word; in many Bibles, you’ll find the made-up compound word “lovingkindness” as the translation. It means getting what you don’t deserve, so basically, this place is called “House of Mercy” or “House of Grace.” Today, this pool has been uncovered and sits by the Church of St. Anne, a beautiful church with near-perfect acoustics. It’s known still today as a place of healing. By the way, if you go with me to Israel in January, you’ll get a chance to see this place where this invalid laid, the place where Jesus found him and healed him, and we’ll sing in the church next to it. But this day, Jesus healed the invalid with a word. He doesn’t touch him, he doesn’t use any prayers, he doesn’t anoint him with oil. Jesus simply says to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk” (5:8). And that’s when the trouble begins, because when the man does what Jesus tells him to, he is cornered by the religious leaders. You see, he’s carrying his mat, the bed he used to lay on, on the Sabbath. And on the Sabbath, carrying your mat was considered to be work. Any form of work was forbidden on the Sabbath. The religious leaders see this happening, and they completely ignore the miracle and focus on the legal violation. Do we ever do that? Do we ever miss what God is doing because he’s not doing it the way we think he should? That’s another question worth pondering.

Long story short (because there’s so much here I would love to get into, but that would just take me down a whole bunch of rabbit trails): the guy sells Jesus out and so the religious leaders come to, in John’s words, “persecute him” (5:16). In fact, here’s how John sums up the case they have against Jesus: “For this reason [because he healed a man] they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God” (5:18). They have gone from harassing Jesus to wanting to kill him in just a short time; boy, did that escalate quickly (cf. Wesley One Volume Commentary, pg. 653)! But in the mind of these religious leaders, Jesus is committing blasphemy and for that, he deserves to die. So in the midst of that kind of setting, Jesus launches into a long monologue about his authority and how he can back that authority up.

In the passage we read this morning, Jesus gives four kinds of testimony that point to the truth of what he is about. In the Jewish tradition, you had to have at least two witnesses for something to be considered true; Jesus has taken that tradition and doubled it! So what are these four witnesses? First, there is Jesus’ own testimony, but even he admits that doesn’t really count (5:31). The rabbis said if you only testified about yourself, your testimony would not be believed. There had to be external validation of what you were saying or doing. So if Jesus were teaching what he was teaching or doing what he was doing on his own authority, it could be easily ignored. Now, notice that Jesus does not say his own testimony is not true (because it is); he simply recognizes that in that culture it is not valid on its own (cf. Card, John: The Gospel of Wisdom, pg. 81; Whitacre, IVP: John, pg. 135). However, there is a second witness: John the Baptist. In fact, Jesus indicates that the religious leaders have interviewed (or interrogated) John about Jesus, and that John has told them the truth about who Jesus is. If you would turn back just a few pages in John’s Gospel, he tells us (in chapter 1) that John the Baptist’s assessment of Jesus was this: Jesus is “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (1:29). In other words, Jesus is exactly who he says he is. John’s witness and testimony are independent of Jesus’ own witness. John is number two.

But Jesus doesn’t stop there. There are two other witnesses, two other testimonies to the truth for the religious leaders to consider, and this testimony, Jesus says, is “weightier” than the other (5:36). We can call these witnesses the “work” of God and the “word” of God. “Work” was at the heart of how this whole argument began, and now Jesus calls on the work he has been doing—actually, he calls it the work his Father sent him to do—as evidence that he is who he says he is. We all do tend to wrap up a lot of our identity in what we do, the work we do, and that’s part of why these last several months have been hard on many people. For some, coronavirus didn’t so much threaten their physical lives as their working lives. A lost job is more than lost income, though that’s bad enough, but the loss of identity can be even more devastating. We identify people, very often, by what they do, and we judge their worth by the quality of their work. Jesus tells the religious leaders: look at what I’ve been doing. That should tell you who I am. In John’s Gospel so far, Jesus has changed water into wine, cleared the Temple courts, pointed a Samaritan woman toward the living water, and healed two different men of their ailments. This is the work, Jesus says, the Father sent me to do, and they will tell you who I am and what I am about. But the religious leaders can’t understand the works because they lack the faith to truly see what is really going on (cf. Card 81). “We must believe in order to see” (Card 79).

So that brings us to the last witness: the word of God, or Scripture. Still today, religious leaders in Israel pour over the Scriptures. When I was in Jerusalem in 2012, I discovered that off to the side of the Western Wall or the Wailing Wall is a little alcove; actually, it’s not all that little. It’s a large room where bearded rabbis spend all day studying and discussing the Scriptures. There, in that place closest to all that remains of the first-century Temple, these men (and they are all men in there) seek to understand these texts that have been handed down generation after generation, just as their ancestors would have done in Jesus’ time. These religious leaders who confront Jesus, who want to kill Jesus, are experts in what we call the Old Testament text. They probably spend most of their time (when they aren’t harassing Jesus) reading, studying and meditating on the text. And yet, Jesus says, they don’t really get it. They don’t understand the texts they read. How can he say such a thing? I mean, of all the things he has said to them, this might have been the most offensive. It’s like telling a doctor who has spent thousands of dollars and many years in learning and studying and training and practicing, “You don’t know anything about medicine.” Jesus says that they have completely missed the point of the Scriptures because all of the texts point to him. He is the fulfillment of everything in the Old Testament. They refuse to listen to him, who is the Word of God made flesh (cf. John 1:14; Card 81). They’ve assumed that the point of learning the Scripture is to act good and to look good in the eyes of others, but the real point of the Scriptures is to bring people to Jesus (cf. Wright, John for Everyone: Part One, pg. 69).

And that’s where this morning’s question comes in. All of this discussion leads us to verse 44, where Jesus asks this question: “How can you believe since you accept glory from one another but do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” That is a packed question, and it is very pointed at all of us who think it matters more what others think than what God thinks. The religious leaders in this account are focused on the externals, on doing all that the law of the Old Testament says to do and not doing the things is says not to do. It’s not so much about believing in God as it is following a particular legal code. In fact, to make sure they were following it, they had developed a whole lot of what was called “oral law,” laws about the law, to prevent them from breaking the actual law. For instance, let’s say the law says, “Thou shalt not spit on the sidewalk.” Well, an oral law might be developed that said, “Thou shalt not even walk on the sidewalk,” because if you don’t walk on it, you can’t spit on it, right? And if you happen to break that oral law, at least you haven’t broken the real law. Now, that’s a silly example, except to point out that it was all about appearances. It was all about gaining approval and praise and honor from those around you. For these religious leaders, they were more afraid of losing their reputation than of disobeying God.

Let’s be honest: most if not all of us get where the religious leaders are coming from. Okay, I’ll be honest: I understand them. I get them. I’m a self-confessed affirmation junkie; I thrive on affirmation, and yet at the same time, I have this need to have everything perfect. But since everything is not perfect, I tend to be overly critical of anything I do. I’m surprised my wife is not loudly “amening” right now. So I understand these religious leaders because I find myself wondering all the time what others are thinking of me. In my humanness, I find myself behaving like those religious leaders, longing for praise from other people, and especially if they have any sort of authority over me. And when we live like that, when we’re wired like that, it’s easy to begin to depend on receiving “glory from humans” (5:41). It’s easy for that sort of praise to mean more than affirmation from God.

Maybe none of you know what I’m talking about. Maybe you’ve already gotten this figured out and you don’t worry about what the people around you are saying about you. You don’t skim Facebook and see how many “likes” your post has gotten. You don’t post the very best pictures on Instagram so that others will see how good and perfect you and your life is. Maybe you don’t work yourself nearly to death in your job trying to meet your boss’ impossible demands just so that he or she will like you. I hope you’re one who doesn’t worry about how others perceive you through your car or your home or your fashion choices. It’s interesting, isn’t it, to notice the choices people even make in the masks they wear? What do they want you to know about them by what they put over their face? Anyway, maybe you have this all figured out, and I hope you do, but I’m willing to best most if not all of us are more like the religious leaders than we’d willingly admit.

Jesus says when we seek glory from other people first, we do not have the love of God in our hearts (5:42). Now, that’s harsh, and it’s especially hard for an affirmation junkie like me to hear. But he goes on to say that true belief focuses on only seeking the glory that comes from God. So what is that? What does it look like? And how do we get there? Part of what I struggle with or stumble over here may be the word “glory.” It might help us to read “approval” there instead of glory. In other words, we can’t really believe, we can’t really find faith if all we’re looking for is the approval of others, of the people we can see around us. Or maybe a different way to look at it is this: if we’re satisfied with the praise or the approval we get from people, then that’s all we’ll get. C. S. Lewis put it this way: “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.” Jesus says true belief involves setting our sights and our desires higher.

Some of you know, part of my path to pastoral ministry involved serving as the president of the InterVarsity chapter at Ball State. I did that for three years, and over those three years, we saw that ministry consistently drop in large group attendance. Now, I know there were a lot of factors to that, but in my longing for human approval, I can tell you that I took it personally. Let me let you in on a little secret: every leader of any size group always takes it personally when things don’t go as expected, especially when people leave the group. I prayed about it, I worried about it, I got frustrated about it, and I remember sitting down after one of my last large group meetings, in the classroom after most everyone else had left, and I was feeling defeated. Now, no one had come out and said, “This is all your fault,” but I figured they were saying that to each other. And I sat there, prayed, and had a little pity party for myself. Just trying to be honest here! And, in the middle of that, as I sat there, I sensed God saying to me, “Are you done with the pity party yet?” Well, no, not quite yet, but if you’ve got something to say, I’m listening. And I sensed God saying one thing to me: “Have you been faithful?” Have you been faithful? Have you done what I’ve asked you to do, regardless of the outcome? Have you been faithful?

I think that’s the essence of answering Jesus’ question here: being faithful to his calling on your life. Regardless of the outcome, regardless of what others think or say or do—have you been faithful to his call? Believing in him is following him, keeping your eyes on him, being faithful to him. One writer puts it this way: in the Old Testament, for these Jewish religious leaders Jesus is dialoging with, faith meant obeying. But in the New Testament, for all who would come after Jesus, faith means following. Believing means faithfulness. And that night, in the Arts and Communications Building on Ball State campus, I said back to God, “I think I have. I’ve tried in every way I know to be faithful to your call.” And this is what I heard in my spirit: “Then that’s enough.” That’s enough.

“How can you believe since you accept glory from one another but do not seek the glory that comes from the only God” (5:44)? So how do we seek “the glory that comes from the only God”? First of all, we have to know him. I know I say that a lot, and maybe you get tired of hearing me say it, but I say it because it’s true. None of the rest of this matters if you don’t know Jesus, and in any era (but, it seems, especially today) it’s deceptively easy to know a lot about Jesus but not to know Jesus (Wright 70). I can’t tell you how many people I’ve heard pretty much the same story from: that they were a lifelong faithful church attender but it was late in life before they ever came to know Jesus. They know a lot about him, but had never come to know him. So we get to know him in the Scriptures when we study the text. But, you know, the religious leaders were experts in the text. They knew the text better than anyone, and yet they did not recognize God’s savior when he came, so it’s not enough to just study the text. It’s not enough even to memorize the text. We get to know Jesus by reading what he says and then doing what he says. That’s the part the religious leaders missed. They were content with head knowledge; Jesus calls us to action, to hands and feet knowledge. We also get to know him in the faces of other people. Jesus is not just like you or me. As I shared last week, we know from reading the Scriptures that all humanity reflects the image of God—red and yellow, black and white, as many of us sang as children. Jesus is the only one who showed us what God is like perfectly, but within each person is part of what the ancients called the imago dei, the image of God. That’s part of why we need each other, why we’re called to community. We get to know God better in the face of our sisters and brothers—of all colors and creeds. Jesus prayed that we would all be one, and we have a long way to go on that. How might we better come to know him if we actually lived that unity, that prayer of Jesus, out?

As we come to know him, our goal is to follow him. It’s been my experience that far too much of our faith is about trying to get Jesus to follow us. We pray and we tell God how we want things to work out. In church life, that means we pray at the beginning and the ending of the meeting and often leave God off to the side for the rest of it. We do the same thing in our personal lives; we ask God’s blessings on plans we have already made rather than asking him what our plans should be. Jesus, I’m going this way and I want you to go with me. And Jesus says, well, I’m going this way and you should follow me. The more we come to know him, the more we will want to follow him, to do what he calls us to do, to live in the way he wants us to live. There’s a lot of talk these days about being a leader, especially in the church, but all Jesus ever asked us to be were followers. Not followers of each other, but followers of him. And that’s the point of his statement here in this passage: life will work out so much better if we follow him rather than expecting him to follow us. Life is meant to be lived as a follower, seeking his approval rather than hoping for and working for the approval of the people around us.

I want to have the same desperation and determination to follow Jesus that I had the first time I was in the Old City of Jerusalem. It was near the end of the day, and our bus captain, Phil Granger, said he knew of a shop that sold handmade stoles, the scarf-like thing that pastors wear around their neck sometimes. I and several others said we were interested and so we broke off from the main group and went charging through the streets of the Old City, looking for this shop. And I do mean “charging.” They moved fast. I tried to keep up, I really did, but it wasn’t too long before I lost sight of Phil. I couldn’t see him anywhere. And all I could think was—here I am, in a strange land, in a crowd of people and I have no idea how to get back to the bus or back to the hotel. This was 1995; I did not have a cell phone. So I did the only thing I knew to do—I kept walking in the same direction I had last seen Phil go. And after a few minutes, I saw another pastor from our group. He was waving me on, pointing me in the direction Phil had gone. I was never so relieved as I was when I saw that pastor friend. I was desperate to follow—and I want to be that desperate to follow Jesus each and every day. I want to believe not just with my head, not just because I know about him. I want to believe because I know him and I’m following him wherever he leads. Do you want to come along with me—and him? Let’s pray.