“Before Abraham was…” (John 8:48-59)

For those of you who are old enough to have watched the Seinfeld show on tv, you may recall an episode from twenty-five years ago entitled “The Comeback”. It all revolved around a conversation in the opening scene between George Costanza and a co-worker named Reilly. The two are taking a snack break at a business meeting, when Reilly observes that George is gobbling down considerably more than his fair share of a shrimp cocktail. This prompts Reilly to remark, “Hey George, the ocean called; they’re running out of shrimp.”

The result is that for much of the remaining half hour of the programme we see George making a succession of desperate attempts to come up with an equally witty comeback. But the outcome of all his efforts is a series of rejoinders that range from the pathetic to the positively offensive.

This morning’s verses from John come at the end of a series of exchanges between Jesus and some of the Pharisees. You can detect their hostility right from the very beginning. In verse 12 Jesus has just made one of his seven great amazing “I am” proclamations: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

Coming from anyone else, this would seem to be an outrageously egotistical claim to make. And so, understandably, it prompts a contrary response from the Pharisees in the following verse: “You are bearing witness about yourself; your testimony is not true.” And so the debate begins, back and forth, going on and on through the following thirty-five verses, and taking us right up to this morning’s passage.

This time it is the Pharisees’ turn to fire the opening volley. And it is a zinger: “Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?”

To understand the depth of this insult, take a moment and if you can, think way back to chapter 4, to Jesus’ conversation with a Samaritan woman. You may recall how Jews and Samaritans regarded one another with hostility. In fact they had been engaged in an ongoing feud that had lasted for centuries. The result was that to call another person a Samaritan was to class them with the lowest of the low, someone you would not trust to let out of your sight for even a fraction of a second. Then, as though that insult were not enough, the Pharisees added another: “You have a demon.” It was as if to say that Jesus was not only a sad specimen of humanity, but that he was positively evil.

However, it is already clear that the Pharisees’ argument is weak. As Bishop J.C. Ryle observed 150 years ago, “To lose temper, and call names, is a common sign of a defeated cause.”[1] But once again Jesus was ready with an answer for them: “I do not have a demon, but I honour my Father, and you dishonour me…”

Jesus and the Father (48-51)

Now these words of Jesus may not stand out for us as being especially remarkable. As Christians we are accustomed to addressing God as “our Father”. It’s what Jesus has taught us to do. But I can only imagine that for the Pharisees Jesus’ referring to God as “my Father” would have more than raised a few eyebrows.

In the Old Testament there are fewer than half a dozen passages where God is referred to as “Father”. Yet here was Jesus speaking of the ineffable God, the God who thundered from the top of Mount Sinai, the God who was so holy that his name could never be pronounced by human lips—here was Jesus referring to the all-powerful Lord of all as “my Father”.

One of the images that the gospels give us of Jesus is of his intimate relationship with God the Father. We witness it most especially on the eve of his crucifixion. In what is commonly referred to as his high priestly prayer, John tells us “Jesus lifted up his eyes to heaven and said, ‘Father…, glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you…’” (John 17:1). As he kneels in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus pleads, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me” (Luke 22:42). And hours later, as he hangs from the cross, Jesus cries out on behalf of his executioners, “Father, forgive them…” (Luke 23:34).

Everywhere in the gospels we see that Jesus enjoyed a unique intimacy with the Father. And while this may have angered the Pharisees, the whole purpose of Jesus’ coming was that you and I might share in that relationship through faith.

It would not be going too far to say that this is the whole aim that John had in mind when he took the effort to write his gospel. In the opening verses we find him writing, “To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God…” (John 1:12). Then, in his first epistle he rejoices, “See what glorious love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are!” (1 John 3:1).

In Mark’s gospel (14:36) we learn that the expression that Jesus used to address his Father was the intimate word “Abba”. I had a first-hand experience of what that word means when we were renting a lakeside cottage one summer. The family next to us were from Israel and I remember one day hearing their little daughter running up from the beach to her dad, excitedly shouting, “Abba! Abba!”

And this is the relationship with God into which Jesus invites you and me today as we open our lives to him in faith. However, let me make it clear that this is not a relationship of crass familiarity. Rather, it is one of childlike trust, respect and obedience to an all-wise and all-powerful Father—one we know who desires only our good.

Jesus and Abraham (52-56)

But back to the dispute between Jesus and his detractors. It was time for them to launch another volley. “Are you greater than our father Abraham?” they ask. Their challenge was an accusation that Jesus either suffered from a delusional sense of grandeur or that he was deliberately lying. And I cannot imagine that they were ready for his reply: “Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day.”

What was Jesus talking about when he made this claim? There are at least three possible answers. And for each of them we need to go all the way back to the Book of Genesis. The first comes in chapter 12. Abraham was still living in the city of Ur at the time, in what is now modern-day Iraq. It was there that the Lord met with him and told him to go to a land that he would reveal to him. “I will make of you a great nation … and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:1-3).

Now the first half of that promise had long been fulfilled. The nation of Israel had existed in one form or another for more than a thousand years. But it was in Jesus that the second half of that promise would become a reality, that not just a single nation, but all the families of the earth would be blessed—and you and I this morning are the fruit of that. And there are peoples we have never heard of in in every corner of the world who are still finding that blessing that God promised to Abraham and that comes to us through Jesus.

The second incident that Jesus may have been referring to comes in Genesis 17. By this time Abraham had reached the ripe old age of ninety-nine and his wife Sarai was not far behind him. They had long given up on any hope of having a child. Yet God promised once again that he would give them a son. These were his words in reference to Sarah: “I will bless her, and she shall become nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.” (Genesis 17:16). Abraham’s response was to fall facedown with laughter. And I can only imagine that tears of wonderment and joy must have streamed down into his beard, as he contemplated the God of wonders who is always faithful to his promises. And once again that promise found its fulfilment in Jesus.

The third incident comes in the chapter that follows, in the dramatic account of the near sacrifice of the son whom Sarah had borne. God comes to him once again and commands him, “Abraham! Take your son, your only son Isaac whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you”. I’m sure we’re all familiar with how the story proceeds. At the last minute, with his knife raised, Abraham hears a voice telling him to stop. As he looks up he glimpses a ram caught in a thicket and he knows that the Lord has provided a sacrifice. And Abraham called the place where it all happened, “The Lord will provide.” (Genesis 22:1-14)

More than a thousand years later another sacrifice would take place on that same mountain and it would be another Lamb of God’s providing, another substitute, who with outstretched arms would offer life, and salvation for all people. “Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.”

Jesus the I AM (57-59)

Now you might think that this would have stopped the Pharisees. But they were determined to win the debate. “You are not yet fifty years old,” they retorted, “and have you seen Abraham?” To which Jesus replied with what has to be one of the most astounding claims in all of Scripture: “Before Abraham was, I am.”

Now I suspect that most of you are familiar with what are called the seven “I am” sayings of Jesus that are all found in John’s gospel:

•  “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.” (John 6:35)

•  “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” (John 8:12)

•  “I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved.” (John 10:9)

•  “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep… I know my own and my own know me…” (John 10:11,14)

•  “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though they die, yet shall they live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.” (John 11:25-26)

•  “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6)

•  “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5)

Each one is in itself a remarkable statement. And we have encountered a couple of them already as we have been making our way through the Gospel of John. But in this morning’s reading we come across an eighth: “Before Abraham was, I am.”

To my mind this is the most astounding of Jesus’ claims in all the gospel. Notice that Jesus does not say, “Before Abraham was, I was,” but, “Before Abraham was, I am.” To understand this fully we need to go back to the Old Testament again, this time to the story of Moses in Exodus 3. Moses was tending his father-in-law’s sheep far out in the wilderness when he spotted a bush in flames (something that should send chills down our spines in Nova Scotia right now!). But when he looked, he could see that although the bush was on fire, it was not being consumed. Then, as he got closer, he could hear a voice calling to him out of the flames: “Moses, Moses…”

We don’t have time to go through the whole story right now, but the upshot was that Moses was hearing none other than the voice of God. This was the almighty creator of heaven and earth, calling him to lead his people out of their centuries-long slavery in Egypt. When Moses asked how he was to explain this to them, he was told, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I am has sent me to you.’ … This is my name for ever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.” (Exodus 3:15).

The Pharisees caught the allusion in a snap. No more clever comebacks now! The time for civilized debate was over. And they began to pick up rocks to stone Jesus to death.

But there is another reaction they could have had. It is the reaction of Thomas seeing Jesus after his resurrection and exclaiming, “My Lord and my God!” And it will be the chorus of thousands upon ten thousands who will gather around his throne and cry aloud,

Worthy is the Lamb who was slain,
to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might
and honour and glory and blessing! (Revelation 5:12)

And by God’s grace you and I will be among them.

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[1]     Expository Thoughts on the Gospels, John, vol 2, 122

“O that you would rend the heavens” (Isaiah 64:1-9)

What this country needs, what the church needs, is a restoration of the vision of the Most High God… The honor of God has been lost to men. And the God of today’s Christianity is a weakling. He is a little, cheap palsied “god” that you can pal around with. He’s the “Man upstairs”. He’s the fellow that will help you in difficulty and not bother you too much when you’re not.[1]

Those are the words of the great Chicago preacher, A.W. Tozer. I believe they are truer today when he first spoke them to his congregation two or three generations ago. The “god” that Tozer describes is certainly not the God of the prophet Isaiah, from whom we will be reading throughout the four Sundays of this season of Advent. But first we need to say a little bit about Isaiah himself.

In fact Isaiah reveals very few details about his personal life. His name means, “The Lord is salvation”. He tells us in the opening verse of his prophecy that his father was called Amoz and that his ministry extended from the end of the reign of King Uzziah of Judah into the reign of Hezekiah, which adds up to a period of about forty years. Although we don’t know his wife’s name, we do know that he was married and that they had two sons, who bore two of the most unwieldy names in all of Scripture: Shearjashub and Maher-shalal-hash-baz.

According to tradition, Isaiah was of noble blood. There is also a tradition that he was martyred by order of the evil king Manasseh, by being sawn asunder. Thus when the author of the Letter to the Hebrews writes of saints of the past who were sawn in two, this may just be a reference to a tradition about Isaiah.

Far more important than any of these details is the fact that Isaiah’s prophecy sprang out of a profound experience of the presence of God. There is hardly a more arresting passage in all the Bible than Isaiah’s description of God’s call to him as he worshiped in the Temple: the hem of God’s garment filling the whole of that vast structure, the flying seraphim each with their six wings crying aloud, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts!” and the prophet himself falling on his face and protesting, “Woe is me! I am lost… for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”

The Lord

It is this astounding vision of God that permeates and dominates the whole sixty-six chapters of Isaiah’s prophecy, not least the chapter that we have before us this morning. The nine verses that we have read fall in fact towards the end of a longer poem, which begins in verse 7 of the previous chapter. There, Isaiah begins, “I will recount the gracious deeds of the Lord…” He takes his listeners back to the time when the Lord revealed himself to his people on Mount Sinai. There, Isaiah tells us, “he became their Savior”. He did not send an angel to rescue them but led them himself.

The sad truth was, however, that the people quickly forgot about what the Lord had done for them. Their life-changing experience had faded to less than a dim shadow their memory. And what had been true of the nation of Israel in Moses’ time continued to be true in Isaiah’s time as well. For them God was like an absentee landlord, little more than a vague concept. As chapter 63 draws to a close, Isaiah laments, “We have long been like those whom you do not rule, like those not called by your name.”

So it is that as our passage opens this morning Isaiah cries out, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down…” We find that verb which our Bibles translate “tear open” numerous times in the Old Testament. In most instances it has to do with people tearing apart their garments much like the Incredible Hulk does as he rips off his shirt. In those days, however, it was a sign of deep sorrow, of repentance and mourning. People would tear off what they were wearing and then clothe themselves in sackcloth. In the same way, Isaiah begs the Lord to tear apart the heavens, to rip open the clouds and to be undeniably, unmistakably present with his people as he had been in the days of Sinai. “That the mountains would quake at your presence…, that the nations might tremble at your presence!”

Isaiah’s dream, Isaiah’s fervent desire, was that God should reveal himself to his people with power as he had done with Moses at Mount Sinai. The words that Moses had heard that day were these: “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty…” (Exodus 34:6,7).

The God whom Isaiah worshiped and served was not only infinitely powerful. He is also holy: and therein lies the problem. He would not countenance the people’s sins. He would not tolerate their waywardness and rebellion, their apathy towards him on the one hand and their indifference towards their own sins on the other. Isaiah’s words for his people (and note how he includes himself: it is always “we” not “they”) are devastating. “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.” In fact, Isaiah’s term in the original Hebrew is considerably coarser than our English translations render it. It should really be a menstrual rag.

Our Father

Yet fortunately there is more to Isaiah’s message—and to Isaiah’s God—than that. We see in verse 8 that God who is the almighty and holy Lord is also our Father. To speak of God as Father is simply a given for us. Yet in the Old Testament it is a rarity. Psalm 68:5 speaks of God as the father of orphans. Yet that is more in the sense of a protector, a guardian. In the messianic Psalm 89, the coming king cries out, “You are my Father…” Aside from that there are a half dozen other references, but most of them are accounts of Israel’s failure to honor God as Father at all.

We have to wait for Jesus in the New Testament for God fully to be revealed as Father. There we find Jesus teaching his followers to address God not just as Father, but as Abba, “our Father”, “Papa”. It is a term of intimacy used only by family members. Against the background of the Old Testament you can see why all the religious people of his day, Pharisees and Sadducees alike, were shocked. To address the thrice-holy God in such a familiar manner was effrontery. Worse than that, it was blasphemy.

Yet we have the kernel of it here in Isaiah—not only here in verse 8, but twice in the preceding chapter as well. “For you are our Father, though Abraham does not know us and Israel does not acknowledge us; you, O Lord, are our Father; our Redeemer from of old is your name.” So it is that God comes to us not only as the mighty Lord, who causes the mountains to tremble, he comes to us also as a Father—our Father—in tenderness and compassion. “As a father has compassion for his children,” we read in another of those rare references in the Old Testament, “so the Lord has compassion for those who fear him” (Psalm 103:13).

Once again, it is Jesus who gives us the fullest picture of that, in the parable of the prodigal son. There the father patiently, expectantly, waits for his wayward son to return home. And when the son finally appears, the father’s legs cannot carry him down the road quickly enough to meet him. He wraps his arms around him, places a robe on his shoulders and a ring on his finger and brings him home again to celebrate. 

The Potter

We have only to move on a few words to find a third image that Isaiah gives us of God: the potter. “We are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.” Isaiah is not the only prophet to use the image of the potter. You will find it in Jeremiah also. There, Jeremiah goes into the potter’s workshop and watches him as he works at his wheel. As he deftly moves his hands a vessel—a jug or a bowl—begins to take shape. But then something goes wrong and the potter reworks the soft, pliable clay into something entirely different. “Then,” Jeremiah says, “the word of the Lord came to me: ‘Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done?’ says the Lord. ‘Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.’ ”

Jeremiah’s emphasis was on the sovereign power of God to do as he wills with his creatures. Isaiah, however, uses the same imagery to underscore something quite different. I believe he is taking us back to the opening chapters of Genesis where God takes the dust of the earth (the word can mean literally a clod of clay) and molds it into a human being—Adam. And that lump of clay bears his image. Isaiah’s picture is of the care and the love that a potter or any artisan puts into each of his artifacts—to the point, I would want to add, where he etches his mark into the bottom of it so that it is identifiable as his work. We have a Creator who cares infinitely for each of his creatures, who has imprinted his own image into us, whose only desire is for our good.

So today, as we read Isaiah’s prophecy through the lens of the gospel, what do we see? That the day would come when the Potter would himself become the clay of his own making, to take on our form and flesh and become one of us. The day would come when the Father would run down to the road to draw his erring children back to himself. The day would come when the earth would indeed shudder. But this time it would not be the heavens that were rent apart, but the curtain of the Temple, as the Son of God cried aloud, “Why have you abandoned me?” Praise God that he has not abandoned us. Praise God that he has not remembered our iniquity forever. We are his people, bought with the blood of his Son.

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[1]     Fellowship of the Burning Heart, 28