“The Journey of Joy” (Isaiah 35)

As I was preparing to preach this week, I considered giving my sermon the title “Getting Serious About Joy”. Then I thought better of it and came up with “Joy Is No Laughing Matter”. All joking aside, were you aware that joy is currently the subject of a high-level academic examination? Nine years ago the Templeton Foundation awarded Yale University a $4.2 million grant to embark on an intensive and wide-ranging multi-year study under the banner “The Theology of Joy and the Good Life”. Since then the project has engaged some top scholars and religious leaders from around the world.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve spent more time than I should have reading articles and listening to interviews with some of those individuals. Here is a quote from one of today’s leading New Testament experts, Tom Wright: “Joy … has everything to do with God rescuing his people… when God finally does something that people have been waiting for… Joy is not just an emotion, but a whole way of looking at the world…” Wright also laments, “There is a serious lack of joy in our society today…,” a lack which he attributes to what he calls “the failure of the modernist dream”.

Another interviewee was renowned German theologian Jürgen Moltmann. When asked, “How do the pursuit of happiness, fun and optimism differ from joy?” this was his reply: “Fun is superficial. It must be repeated again and again. You cannot make yourself joyful—that would be self-satisfaction. Joy is unexpected. It comes as a gift. Joy in the end wins.”

If you’ve got the time, I commend those interviews to you. You can find them, along with a host of others, on YouTube. But this morning our focus is not on theologians and scholars, as learned and helpful as they may be. It is on that wonderful passage that we have just read from Isaiah 35.

Karen and I have a lovely Middle Eastern restaurant that we enjoy eating at from time to time. There is one particular dish on their menu that they feature as “bursting with flavour”—and it happens to be my absolute favourite. Well, perhaps you’ve noticed already that this morning’s verses from Isaiah are bursting with joy. So let’s turn to Isaiah 35 for the next few minutes and see what God has to teach us about joy through this great Old Testament prophet.

First, and just to get our historical bearings, let me fill in some background to say that Isaiah was writing at a critical time. The year was 701 bc, and the seemingly unstoppable forces of the Assyrian empire had overrun pretty well the whole of the little kingdom of Judah. The once fertile vineyards and fields that graced its hills and valleys were a scorched wilderness, its towns and villages heaps of smouldering rubble. Now those armies stood at the very gates of Jerusalem. I can only imagine the sense of doom and desolation that must have gripped the hearts of its people.

The joy of anticipation

Into the midst of this scene comes the prophet, with a message not of doom but of hope, words not of grim despair but of exuberant joy. So let’s turn to chapter 35 and let’s take a moment to count the number of times the prophet uses the word “joy”:

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad (1);
    the desert shall rejoice (2) and blossom like the crocus;
it shall blossom abundantly
    and rejoice (3) with joy (4) and singing.

Do you think Isaiah was getting his message across? It’s a good thing that the Hebrew of the Old Testament was a language rich in words for joy, because even with these four, Isaiah had not exhausted its possibilities. When we read farther along, we will see that he would still have three more to come before the chapter concludes.

Now the joy that Isaiah was writing about in these opening verses is what I would describe as the joy of anticipation. Certainly there was nothing in their current circumstances that Isaiah or his hearers could be happy about. Think of the situation in Israel and Gaza today (or Sudan or Burma or Ukraine for that matter) and you’ll have something of a picture of what the good citizens of Jerusalem were facing in Isaiah’s day. All they could feel was a sense of doom as the Assyrian armies advanced unrelentingly upon them, right up to their very gates.

But Isaiah bids them look not around but ahead. His goal was to help them see that while their present circumstances might be grim (to say the least!), there was a future that God was preparing for them that was nothing less than glorious.

Was Isaiah being excessively optimistic? Perhaps as far as the immediate future was concerned, yes. But Isaiah had his eyes set on a longer outlook—on God’s design for a glorious new heaven and earth. And this is the perspective that we find again and again in the New Testament too. Think of these words from the apostle Paul:

The whole creation is on tiptoe to see the wonderful sight of the sons of God coming into their own. … And the hope is that in the end the whole of created life will be rescued from the tyranny of change and decay, and have its share in that magnificent liberty which can only belong to the children of God! (Romans 8:19)

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! (echoes the apostle Peter) According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you… Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory… (1 Peter 1:6-9)

Surely this joy of anticipation is what Advent is all about, as we look forward with patriarchs and prophets and with Mary and Joseph to the coming of the Christ child—and even more as we await that day when Jesus will come again in his glorious majesty to claim all creation as his own.

The joy of accompaniment

But our joy lies not only in our anticipation of the future. It is also something that God desires us to experience in the present. And I want to affirm that it is a joy in which we can share even in the direst of circumstances.

Fortunately for the people of Isaiah’s day, tragedy was averted. The Assyrian armies were suddenly and mysteriously struck down overnight and forced to withdraw. (Isaiah reveals it was the work of an angel.) But little more than a century later the massive stone walls of Jerusalem would be breached and its thick wooden gates would succumb to the battering ram.

Those who survived the onslaught would be led out in chains to serve as slaves in the Babylonian Empire. Psalm 137 gives plaintive expression to the desolation that gripped the hearts of those exiles:

By the waters of Babylon,
    there we sat down and wept,
    when we remembered Zion…
How shall we sing the Lord’s song
    in a foreign land? (Psalm 137:1,4)

But there were those like Esther and Daniel and others, who would not surrender to their outward circumstances. They remembered the promise that the Lord had made to Joshua centuries before: “I will never leave you or forsake you.” (Joshua 1:5) Even in the face of tragedy and adversity, they held firm to that conviction and to the God of promise.

In the New Testament, Jesus’ followers were increasingly burdened by the dark forces that brooded around them as they gathered in the upper room. Jesus recognized the heaviness that was weighing down on them and said, “You have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.” (John 16:22)

A little story that has helped to make this real for me was told by Stephen Neill, a missionary who served in India eighty years ago. Here is what he wrote:

Some years ago the Christians of a village in India came to me and said “Our well is already dry, and there is no hope of rain for four months. What shall we do?” I said, “I think there is water deeper down; try boring a shaft in the middle of your well.” For six days they worked, and nothing came. The seventh, they came to me radiant with joy and said, “There is water in the well to the height of two men!” They had pierced the hard rock, and forty feet down they had found the hidden stream. Since that day the well has never gone dry. In the hottest weather, when everything all round is scorched and dry, it is always surrounded by a brilliant strip of green. The water was there all the time. When they went deep enough, they found it, and then their hearts were filled with joy.[1]

I don’t want to underestimate the pain and sorrow experienced by those captive people of Judah during their decades of captivity under the Babylonians. Yet I do believe that they survived their enslavement because beneath the adversity and all the suffering and confusion of their exile, there was still for many of them a quiet joy. It was not like the cheers you hear in a football stadium or a hockey arena. But it was grounded in the deep and unshakeable conviction that God, who had led them out of Egypt and into the Promised Land, was with them still—even in their suffering—and that he would never let them go. And so it is that the apostle Paul’s words hold for us today as it held for them: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice!” (Philippians 4:4)

The joy of arriving

But there yet remained a much greater joy that Isaiah looked forward to. It would be the joy that coursed through the people’s hearts on the day that they finally were permitted to resettle Jerusalem after a captivity of more than fifty years. And it was looking ahead to that event that Isaiah took the opportunity to use his two final words for joy:

And the ransomed of the Lord shall return
    and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
    they shall obtain gladness and joy,  
    and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

Now there is something about this third joy that marks it out from the other two. In fact it elevates it to a whole new level. And that is because the joy of their celebration is not just their own. It is the joy of God.

It is the joy that Jesus spoke about at the conclusion of the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin. Do you remember the shepherd’s words when he returned to the fold? “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.” Or how about the woman after she finds her lost coin? Jesus tells us, “She calls together her friends and neighbours, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’” (Luke 15:6,9)

Most movingly of all, it is the joy of the father in the parable of the prodigal son. No doubt there was joy in the heart of the son as he caught sight of his father waiting for him. But his joy did not even begin to compare with that of his father—a joy within him that was such that he ran down the road and embraced him and kissed him; a joy that was such that he put a robe on his back and a ring on his finger and called for a great celebration. (I must admit I always feel a bit for the fattened calf at this point!) But then do you remember his words when the older son complained? “It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.” (Luke 15:32)

So it is that this Advent season calls you and me not only to look forward to Christmas and to the celebration of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem. It calls us to look farther ahead, to that day when we will join our voices with those of all the redeemed to sing,

“Hallelujah!
For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns.
Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory…”
(Revelation 19:6-7a)

And we will stand before the Father to hear his welcome voice, “Well done, good and faithful servant… Enter into the joy of your master.” (Matthew 25:23) And you and I will be joining in nothing less than the joy of God.

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[1]     The Christian Character, 35

“Hosanna to the Lamb!” (Revelation 7:9-17)

 

It was a dark, stormy and very windy night when disaster struck the cemetery. As a cold rain hammered against the sodden earth, a howling gale overturned tombstones, blew down branches and sent cobwebs flying into the dank night air.

Lying in bed, Paul Hopkins heard the savage roar outside and feared the worst. Sure enough, as dawn broke, the Toronto man realized that his collection of carefully wrought Styrofoam grave markers had been devastated by the tempest. The final toll? About $2,000 in damages.

“I set up my cemetery about three weeks before Halloween to set the mood,” Mr Hopkins explains. “This has never happened before.”

He may now have to extend the week’s vacation he takes every year … before Hallowe’en to prepare his haunted house display, but Mr Hopkins, a purchasing agent for an aluminum smelter, vows he’ll repair the battered props before October 31.

Despite the setback, the bulk of his gear remains unscathed. Mr Hopkins estimates that his collection of talking skeletons, animatronic corpses, zombies and ghosts has cost him about $20,000.[1]

That’s an excerpt from an article I came across in the newspaper several years ago.

Hallowe’en is a multimillion-dollar business in Canada. According to one newspaper report, “Canadians have become so wild about Halloween we now spend more per capita on costumes, candy and décor than our U.S. counterparts do, with holiday-related spending that is second only to Christmas.”[2]

Last year October candy and snack food sales topped the $400 million mark. And if covid didn’t manage to put too much of a damper on things, the estimates were that four million kiddies should have been out on the streets last evening to fill their sacks with Hallowe’en goodies. And if your neighbourhood was anything like mine last evening, it was visited by dozens of strange miniature creatures: witches, ghosts, mummies, aliens, zombies—and perhaps a few little princesses and cuddly animals too!

Some people like to trace our Hallowe’en traditions back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. But since the eighth century it has been for Christians All Hallows’ Eve, the night before All Saints’ Day. So it is that today we celebrate what we affirm with our fellow believers around the world in last two phrases of the Apostles’ Creed: the communion of saints and the life everlasting.

If you have a Bible nearby, I’d like you to turn with me now to the passage that was read a few moments ago: Revelation 7:9-17. I know that for many of us the Book of Revelation is strange, if not uncharted, territory. Its array of multi-headed creatures, stars falling from the sky, plagues and fearsome horsemen, make Hallowe’en seem like the child’s play that it is. Yet I want to affirm that a careful reading of Revelation can lead to untold riches. To do that we need to take into account its historical context. And we need to be careful not to be led astray by the false teachings that have plagued the church in almost every century since it was written. So with that in mind let’s turn to Revelation, chapter 7.

The Crowd

As we begin reading, we find that we are surrounded by an enormous crowd—a multitude, John tells us, greater than anyone could number.

Now to put this in context we need to go back into the earlier chapters of Revelation. And as we do, we find that this multitude has been growing. It begins with just four strange creatures that John describes as “living beings”. Day and night they give thanks to the One who sits on the throne in words that are familiar to many of us:

Holy, holy, holy
is the Lord God Almighty,
who was and is and is to come!

The fours are quickly joined by twenty-four others, whom John describes as elders. They too fall down and, laying their crowns before the throne, they cry aloud,

You are worthy, our Lord and God,
 to receive glory and honour and power,
for you created all things,
 and by your will they were created
and have their being.

No sooner have they completed their refrain than John finds himself surrounded by an enormous chorus of angels, “numbering thousands upon thousands”—no, ten thousand times ten thousand. Now the word John uses here is “myriads”. In its literal sense it means ten thousand. But in fact it was the highest number in Greek and I think we could take it as the equivalent of our word “gazillion”. So we might say that what John witnessed around him was a gazillion gazillion angels chanting in unison,

Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain,
to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength
and honour and glory and praise!

And if all that were not enough, they are joined by every creature on earth, who join in thunderous chorus singing,

To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb
be praise and honour and glory and power,
for ever and ever!

As I read this I am reminded of Jesus’ parables about God’s reign. So many of them have to do with growth, from something as tiny and insignificant as a mustard seed, to a sizeable bush in which birds could even make their nests.

Now John gives us a picture of God’s reign in its fullness. And we find ourselves with him in the midst of a multinational, multiracial, multilingual crowd, all encircling the throne and crying aloud with a single voice,

Salvation belongs to our God,
who sits on the throne,
and to the Lamb.

Personally, I find it all overwhelming, as I am sure John did. I can never read these verses without finding myself deeply moved.

The Chorus

One of the great privileges of Christian faith is that it unites us with people from every corner of the globe. John was given this great vision that he recounts in the Book of Revelation in the final years of the first century. He was writing from the little island of Patmos off the Turkish coast. In the course of his lifetime he had witnessed the Christian faith fan outwards from Jerusalem to most of the Roman world, and possibly even as far away as India.

In our own day it is estimated that as much as half the world’s population has still to hear the good news of Jesus. At the same time, as the church appears to be in decline throughout much of western society, there is an explosive growth of Christian faith in other parts of the world, most notably in sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia.

One of the highlights of my years in Minnesota was to welcome more than a hundred refugees from Burma into our congregation. When they arrived, there were no more than a handful who could speak even a few words of English. Yet in spite of our inability to communicate, there was no question that we all shared a deep bond in Christ. Moreover, as we came to know them and to hear their stories, we discovered that they had a faith in Jesus that had sustained them through years of indescribable deprivation and persecution. Theirs was a faith that made ours seem shallow in comparison. And what a thrill it was last Sunday morning to hear from David Kromminga of a Kurdish immigrant inviting people into his Christian community!

Yet this is only one perspective of what the creed describes as “the communion of saints”—and it is a two-dimensional one at best. For our fellowship with other believers is not confined horizontally to the present. Rather, it is three-dimensional in that it also stretches vertically through history.

We must never lose sight of the fact that we share in faith—even more than that, we owe our faith—to women and men who over the course of years past have discovered in Jesus their hope and their salvation: to Bishop Walsham Howe and Edward Perronet and Edward Caswall, who wrote and translated the hymns of this morning’s service; to great Christian leaders and thinkers such as Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, C.S. Lewis, Amy Carmichael, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Gregory the Great, Augustine, Athanasius, Irenaeus and Polycarp (to name but a few); to the millions over the years who chose to surrender their lives rather than surrender their faith in Jesus; and to the countless more whose names we may never know but who are known to Jesus. Indeed, they are engraved on the palm of his hand.

The Cross

Before we leave them, though, we need to take another look at John’s description of this vast, innumerable crowd. John tells us that they were holding palm branches in their hands. Throughout ancient Middle Eastern society palm branches were commonly used as a symbol of victory, joy, peace and eternal life.

But I don’t need to remind you that this is not the first time we see people waving branches of palm. There had been a previous occasion, which John would have remembered with vividness. For he himself had been there, accompanying Jesus as he travelled the road into Jerusalem for what would be the last time. And we all know how the crowds waved their branches of palm, exuberantly shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”

Now when you translate “Hosanna!” from Hebrew, it means something like “Save us, we pray!” But turn back to our passage from Revelation this morning. Notice that this time the crowd does not cry, “Hosanna!” (“Save us!”) but, “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.”

Do you see the difference? It may seem small, but I think it’s significant. For those white-robed saints standing around the throne salvation is not a hope. It is not a prayer. It is a present reality. For God has accomplished their salvation, and he has done it through the sacrificial blood of the Lamb.

So it is that with them we are brought to the foot of the cross—not as a place of sadness and defeat, but as one of joy and victory. Not as a place of darkness and gloom, but where all the radiance of God’s eternal glory shines forth.

For the Lamb at the centre of the throne
will be our shepherd;
he will lead us to springs of living water.
And God will wipe away every tear from our eyes.

What we have read in these verses from the Bible this morning is but a snapshot of the mighty chorus among whom John stood, gathered around the throne of the Lamb. And the victory they shared is what we celebrate as we observe this festival of All Saints. As we do so, we find that our focus is not so much on the “saints” (and I suspect that is the last thing they themselves would want!). Rather, with them we fix our eyes on the one who sits on the throne in their midst—on the Lamb around whom we gather in unending praise. In the words of one of this morning’s hymns,

O that with yonder sacred throng
We at his feet may fall,
Join in the universal song,
And crown him Lord of all!

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[1] National Post, 18 Oct 2003

[2] National Post, 25 Oct 2014

Sermon – “How are we to believe?” (John 14:1-14)

In the opening words of the Acts of the Apostles, Luke informs us that Jesus “presented himself alive to [the disciples] by many convincing proofs”. We read about half a dozen such incidents in the gospels: Mary Magdalene outside the empty tomb; Cleopas and his fellow traveler along the road to Emmaus; the eleven disciples and later Thomas in the upper room; Peter, John and five others on the lakeside in Galilee… To these Paul adds an occasion when Jesus appeared to more than five hundred of his followers.

My suspicion is that Jesus’ relationship with the disciples following his resurrection was quite different from what it had been before. When you think of it, how could it have been otherwise? While they had once admired and followed him, now they could only worship and adore him. The one in their midst was no longer just the carpenter from Galilee. He was their crucified and risen Lord.

Besides that, I picture Jesus’ presence with the disciples not as a continuous experience as it had been previously, but rather as a series of fleeting, often unexpected, interchanges. In between those appearances there were periods, perhaps of days, when they had time to contemplate all that they had experienced over the previous three years. I imagine too that in those weeks between Easter and Pentecost they must have gathered numerous times. And on those occasions they must have spent much of their time bringing to mind Jesus’ words, discussing them, puzzling over them and relating them to their experience as they awaited “the promise of the Father”. Among those words, spoken perhaps in the very room where they were now gathering, were the ones which formed our Gospel reading this morning: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places…”

In many ways what we are embarking upon in these verses is John’s equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount. Over the next three chapters Jesus gives his disciples some concentrated teaching as he prepares them for his death and resurrection. It was only in the days following the resurrection, however, that the disciples would have had either the opportunity or the coolness of mind to go over what Jesus had said—and I imagine that that was what they spent much of their time doing, again and again and again.

Jesus begins with an invitation—an invitation to trust him. Have you ever noticed that John’s gospel never uses the noun “faith”? For John believing is always a verb, always an action word. In the New Testament the word denotes believing in someone, trusting someone, relying on someone, entrusting yourself to someone. In the verse before us, the action is especially clear because, translated literally, Jesus is saying, not just, “Trust me,” but, “Trust into me.” There is that sense of casting ourselves into his arms, of giving ourselves totally and utterly over to him. On the eve of the crucifixion that would have been a hard sell. But now, after the resurrection, it all began to make a little more sense. And in the verses that follow, Jesus begins to tell them a little bit about what that faith looks like and where it leads.

A place for the homeless

I think that for most of us a sense of place, of having a place where we belong, is an important part of who we are. I am told that the average American moves 11.7 times over the course of his or her lifetime. (I’m not sure what it means to move .7 times!) In my own case I remember as a child moving every two to four years. There can be benefits to that, but it can also lead to a sense of rootlessness, of not having anywhere that you can really call home.

Years ago, when I worked as a student intern in a psychiatric hospital, a number of the patients were Hungarians who had left their country as refugees nearly a generation before. They had not parted with their homeland willingly or voluntarily. They had been forcibly uprooted, and ever since there had lurked deep within them a sense of homelessness. I can only imagine that the same must be true of many of our Karen refugees, who have had to leave everything behind to begin a new life in a strange land, in a foreign language, amid an alien culture and in a forbidding climate. It is a formidable challenge and it reaches right into the core of who we are as persons.

Yet when we read the Bible we discover that at a much deeper level we are all refugees. The cherubim still stand at the gate of Eden brandishing their flaming swords. Generations after Adam and Eve, God promised to Abraham and his descendants a home in the Promised Land. More than three thousand years later Jews still claim Israel as their home. Yet Israel is only a temporary home; and Jerusalem but a type of that city whose architect and builder is God.

If they didn’t know it already, the disciples would soon come to discover their own homelessness in a very blunt and physical sense, as they were driven from the familiar surroundings of Jerusalem and Galilee into the far corners of the Roman world. So it is that Jesus assures them, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places… I am going there to prepare a place for you.”

Faith begins, therefore, with the recognition of our own homelessness in any ultimate sense—and the parallel recognition that at the same time that we have an eternal, unshakeable home that no one can take from us in Jesus Christ and in our relationship with him. That does not mean that we need to become ascetics or that we sever all attachments to this world. But rather, amid the transitoriness and even the outright evil that we experience in this world, it gives us an anchor, a guiding star, that rock of which we will sing later in the course of this morning’s worship, on which to base our lives.

A way for the lost

Jesus gives us the promise of a home, permanent, safe and secure—and Thomas’s question that follows it is a natural one. “But Lord, how can we know the way?” To which Jesus replies with one of the most quoted verses in all of Scripture: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

I am afraid that more often than not Christians (myself included) have used these words of Jesus as a kind of club to beat down the followers of other religions. We concentrate on the second half of what Jesus said and give too little attention to the first. As I read them today, it seems to me that Jesus is offering a wonderful, exciting invitation here and we have turned that invitation into a message of “You’re not welcome.”

Now please don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that there are other ways to the Father, or that we can find ultimate truth or genuine life outside of Jesus. What I am saying is that so often we have concentrated on telling other people that their ways won’t work, that they are dead ends, and somehow in the midst of it all we have neglected to focus on the one way that does bring us to God. The result is that Christian faith ends up looking from the outside as exclusionary. To many we appear to be more interested in shutting people out than in inviting them in—and in many cases we are doing a very good job of it, too!

No doubt there are times when we need to alert the world to the fact that it is on a collision course with destruction, that there is indeed a way that seems right to a person, but its end is the way to death (Proverbs 14:12). The apostle Paul wrote about warning everyone. Yet that is not the focus of our message. The focus is on Jesus in all his transcendent beauty and majesty. I think Graham Kendrick puts it well in the words of his song:

Knowing you, Jesus, knowing you,
there is no greater thing.
You’re my all, you’re the best,
you’re my joy, my righteousness,
and I love you, Lord.

When Isaiah stood in the temple and had his great vision of the Lord seated on his throne in all his heavenly glory, no one needed to tell him he was a sinner. He simply cried aloud, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell among a people of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:1-5). When Peter pulled in his miraculous haul of fish after Jesus had told him to let down his nets on the other side of the boat, he didn’t need anyone to tell him how sinful he was. He fell to his knees before Jesus and exclaimed, “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:4-8)

I do believe that the great majority of people in their heart of hearts and if the truth be told, know that their lives are not right. And I believe that if we, as individual believers and as the community of Christ’s followers were living and proclaiming him in power, they would come to him as the way, the truth and the life.

A power for the faint-hearted

This brings us to a third and perhaps the most puzzling of Jesus’ statements in this morning’s passage: “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.” It seems impossible to believe. After all this was the man who cleansed lepers, gave sight to the blind, gave paralyzed limbs the power to walk again—who even raised the dead. What did Jesus mean?

People have put all kinds of interpretations on these words. Some point to the foundation of hospitals and other charitable institutions by faithful Christians that have brought Christ’s healing and love to millions all over the world. Others point to the miracles that continue to happen in our own time, well-documented accounts of remarkable healings and even people being raised from the dead. New Testament scholar Leon Morris thought of Jesus’ words in a numerical and geographical sense. He wrote,

During his lifetime the Son of God was confined in his influence to a comparatively small sector of Palestine. After his departure his followers were able to work in widely scattered places and influence much larger numbers. But … they were in no sense acting independently of him. On the contrary in doing their ‘greater works’ they were but his agents.[1]

I believe that all these interpretations are valid, and no doubt there are other ways in which we might understand Jesus’ words as well. But underlying them all is the power of the Holy Spirit.

So often as Christians we allow our vision to be limited by our resources. We look at the world around us and we compare ourselves with the vast wealth of governments or multinational corporations and we sigh and say, “We could never do that.” Yet we forget that our God is the one who (in the words of the psalm) owns the cattle on a thousand hills, whose resources are limitless and whose power is infinite. It was not that long before those first Christians who sat in the upper room musing over Jesus’ words were being accused of turning the world upside down—and I suspect that no one was more surprised than they were.

Today, as we continue to rejoice in our risen Lord, may we rest in the assurance of an eternal home, may we show him to be the way, and may we know his power, which is able to do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine, at work within us.

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[1]     The Gospel According to John (New International Commentary on the New Testament), 646