Sermon – “Pilate” (Matthew 27:11-26)

In the Israel Museum in Jerusalem there is a block of white limestone, almost three feet long and two feet across, on which is engraved this inscription:

To the Divine Augustus Tiberius
… Pontius Pilate
… prefect of Judea
… has dedicated [this]

The “Pilate Stone”, as it is called, was discovered in 1961 by Italian archaeologists. Dating from the first century AD, it had been reused as a part of repair work on a staircase leading up to the seating in a theater in the coastal town of Caesarea Maritima. Caesarea Maritima was the governmental and military headquarters of the province of Judea since 6 AD onwards. There Pontius Pilate held sway during his ten years as procurator or prefect, from 26 to 36 AD. The inscription is significant because it is the only actual Roman evidence for the historical existence of the man we meet in this morning’s Gospel reading, the man who has been immortalized in our creeds in the words, “crucified under Pontius Pilate”.

Rising from the ranks of the military, Pilate owed his appointment to the influence of Sejanus, for a time the most influential and feared citizen of Rome. From the beginning of his tenure Pilate did everything possible to antagonize the local citizenry. Previous occupants of his office had respected Jewish customs by removing all images from Roman standards in Jerusalem. Pilate had them secretly brought into the city at night. When the people appealed to have them taken down, Pilate waited five days and then had his soldiers surround the petitioners and threaten them with death. When they would not relent, he finally had the images removed.

Some time later he created further ill will when he had gold-coated shields honoring the emperor Tiberius placed in the Temple. When he refused to take them down, the Jews wrote to Tiberius himself, who commanded that they be removed immediately. Later Pilate used Temple funds to build an aqueduct. When this was met with opposition, he had his soldiers attack, beat and kill scores of the protestors.

Philo, a first-century Jewish philosopher, described Pilate as having “vindictiveness and a furious temper”, and as being “naturally inflexible, a blend of self-will and relentlessness”. In Philo’s words, Pilate’s rule as governor was characterized by “briberies, insults, robberies, outrages and wanton injuries, executions without trial constantly repeated, and ceaseless and supremely grievous cruelty”. This, then, was the man before whom Jesus stood as this morning’s Gospel reading opens.

Are you the king of the Jews?

“Are you the king of the Jews?” Pilate queries. We are reminded of a similar question asked at the beginning of Matthew’s gospel: “Where is the one born king of the Jews?”—and of the sign which would later that day be placed above Jesus’ head on the cross: “This is Jesus, the king of the Jews.” The wise men asked their question in reverent inquiry. Pilate’s came with a sneering superiority.

His aim was no doubt to ridicule both Jesus and the religious leaders at one and the same time. The sad figure who stood before him, his hands bound and faced bruised, looked like anything but a king. As Pilate snickered, I can imagine the chief priests and the elders seething. But there was nothing they could do. They were the ones who had brought Jesus here.

“Are you the king of the Jews?” Jesus’ answer must have ricocheted back at him like a lash: “So you say.” I am rather attracted to Bishop B.F. Westcott’s alternative translation of Jesus’ reply, which turns it into a question: “Is that what you say?” It makes the irony of Pilate’s question all the more stinging. In the end it doesn’t matter which way you translate it really. Either way, this man who was accustomed to absolute power, this little tin god, had been trapped in his own words by a helpless prisoner—and a Jew no less.

It took Pilate a moment or two to regain his composure. “Do you not hear how many accusations they make against you?” To which Jesus makes no reply, nor to any of the other questions that Pilate puts to him. Indeed, the next words we hear from Jesus in Matthew’s gospel do not come until he is hanging on the cross. “He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth” (Isaiah 53:7).

Now Pilate was a man who had seen everything. He had watched (and probably with some degree of pleasure) as his soldiers had beaten people senseless and committed other acts of cruelty and even murder. His final act as procurator of Judea in AD 36 was to order the slaughter of a whole crowd of Samaritan pilgrims. But he did not know what to do with this man who stood before him. Matthew tells us that he was amazed—the same reaction as the crowds in Galilee as they saw the mute speaking, the maimed whole, the lame walking, and the blind seeing. Pilate was no less amazed.

Whom should I release?

We do not know what crept into his mind at this point. But for some reason it hit upon Pilate to explore a legal loophole. Perhaps it was the name, Jesus. In any case, it occurred to him to take advantage of an obscure custom that allowed him to grant liberty to a single prisoner, anyone the people chose. And so he gave them the option of choosing between two Jesus—a notorious brigand, Jesus Barabbas, or Jesus the would-be Messiah.

However Pilate was not to be let off the hook so easily. At that very moment, as he sat on the judgment seat, a message was brought to him. It was from his wife, warning him not to become any further involved with Jesus, whom she described as “that innocent man”. The word used here is in fact “righteous”. It is the same word that Peter used as he looked back to the events of the cross and wrote, “For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God” (1 Peter 3:18).

The interruption, brief though it may have been, did not serve its purpose, however. Indeed it did quite the opposite. For it gave time for the chief priests and the elders to agitate the crowd further against Jesus and to call for Barabbas. So when Pilate turned to them again and asked for the second time, “Whom do you want me to release?” he was met by the unanimous reply, “Barabbas!” “Then what should I do with Jesus?” “Let him be crucified!”

Now crucifixion was a particularly horrific form of death, reserved for the lowest of the low—traitors, slaves and dangerous criminals. Writing a century before the time of Christ, Cicero described it as “that plague” and recommended that even the word “cross” should be far removed from the thoughts, eyes and ears of a Roman citizen. Any Jew witnessing a crucifixion would naturally think of the passage in the Old Testament Law that states, “When someone is convicted of a crime punishable by death and is executed, and you hang him on a tree, his corpse must not remain all night upon the tree; you shall bury him that same day, for anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse” (Deuteronomy 21:22-23). So it was that the apostle Paul could reflect in Galatians 3:13, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.’ ”

While Pilate may not have been fully aware of the particular Jewish horror at crucifixion, he was aware of its particular cruelty. And so he asked one more time, “Why? What evil has he committed?” But his questions only caused the crowd to clamor even more vociferously, “Let him be crucified!”

What unfolded at that point was one last, desperate measure on Pilate’s part—not to have Jesus released (Things had gone far beyond that point and he knew it.) but to exonerate himself. Washing his hands in the sight of all he proclaimed, “I am innocent of this man’s blood.”

Of course Pilate’s words were hollow. He could not evade responsibility for what was unfolding. He knew very well (as he himself admits in John’s gospel) that he had full power to release Jesus or to crucify him. I would be surprised if Pilate had not engaged in questionable justice many times over the course of his career. Yet there was something within him that made him want to be, in this case at least, innocent. But that was not to happen—and there was no amount of hand washing that could make it so. The only innocent person in the scene was Jesus, the Lamb of God without spot or blemish.

The people too protested their innocence as they cried out in frenzy, “His blood be on us and on our children!” We need to note that Matthew has been very specific in his use of words here. He does not say that the crowd answered Pilate, but that it was the people. It is the same word that was used at the beginning of the gospel by the angel who spoke to Joseph in a dream, “You are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). And so his blood would be upon them and upon their children, not as a curse, but to redeem them—and not them alone, but all people everywhere. “You are worthy, Lord, for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9).

With their cries still echoing, Matthew tells us that after having Jesus flogged, he handed him over to be crucified.

What should I do with Jesus?

On Palm Sunday we read the Gospel in a way that is different from every other Sunday in the year. One of the benefits of that is that it reminds us that we are not just to be passive observers of the events surrounding Jesus’ death on the cross, but participants. The apostle Paul wrote of “the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). We have not fully appropriated the meaning of the cross until we have been there, until we have been able to see ourselves in each of the people involved in the story:

·      To acknowledge that, like Pilate, I am not without guilt and that only Jesus can make me clean;

·      To recognize that, like Barabbas, in spite of my sin Jesus has died for me so that I might go free;

·      And to see that I too am one of those wayward and rebellious people whom Jesus came to save and for whom he shed his blood.

In our hymn book there is a hymn, which no doubt we will sing before this week has ended, and which includes the words:

Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee?

Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee.

’Twas I, Lord, Jesus, I it was denied thee!

I crucified thee.

As we look at the cross today, it is not to induce guilt or to assign blame. It is to turn once again in faith and gratitude to our wondrous God, who for our sake made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Bible Study: Pontius Pilate (Matthew 27:11-54)

Getting started

Think back to a time when you felt as though God were absent from your life. What happened to make it work out?

Exploring God’s word

1    What is Pilate’s first question to Jesus? What answer does he receive? What do you think is Pilate’s opinion of Jesus? How does he attempt to secure a discharge for Jesus? Why is he thwarted in his efforts?

2    What do the soldiers do to Jesus? What do you think lies behind their desire to humiliate him? What happens on the way out of the city? Why do the soldiers offer Jesus the wine and gall mixture? How does Jesus respond to this? What do you suppose is the reason behind his refusal?

3    Once Jesus is on the cross, how do the soldiers occupy their time? What is the official charge against Jesus? What are the taunts yelled at him from the passers-by and the religious officials? Can you detect an irony in them?

4    Trace the events that take place beginning at the sixth hour (noon). What effect do they have on the centurion and the other guards?

5    How do you suppose the women felt as they watched from a distance? Which of these events makes the deepest impression on you?

For further thought and action

St Paul spoke of Christ crucified as “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called … Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:23,24). How does this work out in your life today?

Sermon – “Lazarus” (John 11:17-27)

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.
Lord, hear my voice!

Of all the emotions that wring the heart, surely there is none that touches us more deeply than grief. In the Bible we find numerous pictures of it: in the aged Abraham mourning and weeping at the side of the lifeless body of his wife Sarah. In Jacob holding in his hands the blood-soaked cloak of his son Joseph and crying aloud in inconsolable anguish, “It is my son’s robe!” In King David, learning of the death of the rebellious Absalom in battle and wailing, “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would that I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!”[1]

Half a century ago, in what is the most personal of all his books, C.S. Lewis recorded his feelings of deep sorrow following the death of his wife, Joy Davidman:

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don’t really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man’s life. I was happy before I ever met [her]. I’ve plenty of what are called ‘resources’. People get over these things. Come, I shan’t do so badly… Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this ‘commonsense’ vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.[2]

Today in our Gospel reading we also come face to face with grief. This morning’s passage opens mid-way through the story of Lazarus. Jesus has just arrived in Bethany. When Lazarus’ sister Martha learns the news that Jesus has come, she rushes out to greet him. But she cannot hold her feelings of questioning and perhaps not a little resentment within her. And so her first words to him are, “Lord, if only you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Jesus waited

Now if we have read the earlier part of the chapter we know that Martha and her sister Mary had gone to the trouble of sending Jesus a message about Lazarus’ illness some days before, well in time for Jesus to have come to Bethany while their brother was still alive. Nevertheless, Jesus had delayed his departure for two days, and now Lazarus was dead and buried.

We have to credit Mary for her forthrightness in her words to Jesus. So often it is a temptation (for me at least) to hide my real feelings from God. Far more often than I care to admit, my prayers tends to skim along the surface of my life. I am not inclined to share with God my deepest hurts and disappointments—and certainly not to blame them on him!

Yet no doubt there are times for all of us when we are tempted to ask, “God, why couldn’t you have done something?” “Why could you not have acted?” And I think those are perfectly legitimate questions to bring to him. One of the repeated prayers of the Bible is, “O Lord, how long?”

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long? (Psalm 13:1,2)

How long, O Lord? Will you hide yourself forever? (Psalm 89:46)

O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? (Habakkuk 1:2)

How long, O Lord, will you look on? (Psalm 35:17)

My soul is in great turmoil, but you, Lord, how long? (Psalm 6:3)

It was not for lack of faith that Martha came to Jesus with these words. Quite the opposite: for a moment later she is making one of the most profound statements of faith in all of Scripture, “Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” It was her very faith in Jesus that gave her the freedom to come to him in that way.

Throughout this Lenten season we have been opening our services with the words of Jesus from Matthew 11:28, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” And the apostle Peter echoes, “Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7). And so with Martha we have the freedom to respond to Jesus’ own gracious invitation to come to him with our sorrows and disappointments, our hurts and even our anger. “Lord, if only you had been here.”

Jesus wept

Moments later we hear the same words again, not from Martha but on the lips of her sister Mary. And this time John tells us in verse 33 that Jesus “was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved”. As happens not infrequently in the Bible, it is hard to convey the depth of emotion that John is portraying in this verse. The word rendered “greatly disturbed” was originally used of horses. It means “to snort”. Elsewhere in the New Testament it is translated “to scold”, “to censure” and “to warn sternly”. It is used of the guests at Simon’s table when the woman poured her precious ointment over Jesus’ hair. Mark tells us that his guests scolded her—literally “snorted at her” (Mark 14:5).

If this word were not enough, John further describes Jesus as “deeply moved”. Here the word means literally “stirred up”. We find the same word being used of the pool of Bethesda earlier in the gospel. Do you remember how the paralyzed man was waiting for an angel to come and stir up the water (John 5:4)? Matthew’s gospel uses the same word to describe King Herod when the wise men told him of the birth of a new king of the Jews (Matthew 2:3). He was shaken to the core.

Now put these two verbs together and we begin to get the picture of what was happening within Jesus’ heart. One translator (Rieu) has rendered it, “He gave way to such distress of spirit as made his body tremble.” And another (Phillips), “He was deeply moved and visibly distressed.” Then, two verses later, John tells us simply and poignantly, “Jesus wept.” We do not see Jesus like this again until he faces the imminence of his own death in the Garden of Gethsemane.

What caused this enormous show of emotion on Jesus’ part? Was it sorrow over the grief of these two sisters, Mary and Martha? Was it the loss of his good friend Lazarus? That indeed was what some of those present were thinking. Yet I do not believe that it was either of these things, deeply distressing though they were. In reference to this passage English theologian Tony Thiselton has written of an “indignation in principle at what ought not to happen”[3] and I believe that this accurately describes what was taking place deep inside Jesus at that moment.

As he stood outside the tomb of Lazarus, Jesus was standing face to face before the scandal of death. In our fallen world we have come to terms with death. Yes, we grieve over it when it takes our loved ones from us; yet we have come to accept its inevitability. For Jesus, in whom was life, and for the Scriptures, death remains an enemy, a barbarity, an atrocity, an outrage against creation itself. He came that we might have life—life in all its fullness.

And so with Jesus we believe in the sacredness of human life—that life, not death, is God’s intention, God’s gift. In the midst of what Pope John Paul II described as “a culture of death”, we are called, in the words of Protestant theologian Ron Sider, to be “completely pro-life”. That may mean re-examining some of our most basic presuppositions, not only on matters like abortion and euthanasia, but also on controversial issues such as war, gun control, capital punishment, access to health care, world poverty and many others—and it will most certainly mean that we will find ourselves, like Jesus, being deeply troubled by the death that surrounds us.

Jesus’ word

I have entitled this series of sermons “Conversations with Jesus”. At this point we come to what is possibly the most remarkable “conversation” in Scripture. Jesus, still trembling with the emotions that stirred so deeply within him, walks determinedly to the great stone that has been rolled across Lazarus’ sepulcher and says, “Take away the stone.” Martha protests, “Lord, already there is a stench.” (At this point I love the earthier language of the King James Version: “Lord, by this time he stinketh.”) But Jesus would not be dissuaded. And so the stone was rolled away; and Jesus cried out, “Lazarus, come forth!” Then John tells us simply, “The dead man came out.”

“He speaks, and, listening to his voice,
 new life the dead receive…” Sad to say, the time would come when Lazarus would have to die again. What he experienced that day was not resurrection but resuscitation. It is the last and greatest of the seven “signs” in John’s gospel; and like all signs it points to something greater than itself—that even death falls a defeated foe at the feet of Jesus. “The last enemy to be destroyed us death…,” wrote St Paul. “Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:26,57).

In the book of Revelation John looked forward to the great day when the fullness of that victory would no longer be a hope but a present, all-encompassing reality. Like Lazarus in his tomb, John too heard a loud voice, this time saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4).

Until that day comes (and it surely will), death and grief both remain ever-present realities for us. There will be times when our faith is shaken, when we want to scream out from the depths of our spirit, “Lord, if only…” At those times may we remember that the one who came to bring us life has won that victory at the cost of his own death. The one who promised Mary, “I am the resurrection and the life,” was the one who cried out from the cross for you and for me, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Surely he has borne our griefs
 and carried our sorrows—a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

---

[1]     See Genesis 23:1-4; 37:31-35; 2 Samuel 18:33.

[2]     A Grief Observed, 7,8

[3]     Life After Death: A New Approach to the Last Things, 7

Bible Study: Martha, Mary & Lazarus (John 11:1-44)

Getting started

What hymns and Bible passages would you like included at your funeral? Why these in particular?

Exploring God’s word

1    Read John 11:1-16. What is the state of affairs as the passage opens? How does Jesus respond to the sisters’ message? Why do you suppose he chose not to go and see Lazarus immediately?

2    Move on to verses 17 to 27. What had happened when Jesus arrived at Bethany? With what plea does Martha approach Jesus? What reply does Jesus give her in verse 23? How does Martha understand these words? What do you think Jesus meant by his answer?

3    What does Jesus reveal about himself in verses 25 and 26? How does this address Martha’s statement in verse 24? How does Martha’s declaration of faith compare with Jesus’ own words about himself? What do you think he wanted her to grasp?

4    Continue with John 11:28-44. How does Jesus react when he comes to Lazarus’ grave? What would you say was the cause of these tears? Compare Mary’s meeting with Jesus with that of Martha. What response does this prompt in him?

5    What does Jesus do as he stands at the entrance to Lazarus’ tomb? What does Martha have to say about this? What would you have done in these circumstances? What was the final outcome?

For further thought and action

What important lessons may we learn about Jesus—particularly about aspects of his divine and human nature—from this passage?

Sermon – “A Blind Man” (John 9:1-11)

I have to admit that I have more than once been the victim of misconceptions. Perhaps you have been also. Most of them aren’t especially dangerous, but I’m grateful anyway to have them corrected. Here are a few that have been put right for me over the years:

 

•  There is no evidence that Vikings wore horns on their helmets. That goes back to the costumes in an 1876 production of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

•  Medieval Europeans did not believe the earth was flat. In fact, from the time of the ancient Greek philosophers onwards, belief in a spherical earth remained almost universal among European intellectuals.

•  George Washington did not have wooden teeth.

•  Benjamin Franklin did not propose that the wild turkey be used as the symbol for the United States instead of the bald eagle.

•  Napoleon Bonaparte was not short. Quite the opposite: he was slightly taller than the average Frenchman of his time.

•  The Twinkie does not have an infinite shelf life; its listed shelf life is approximately forty-five days.

For the most part, misconceptions such as these are quite harmless (unless you happened to be George Washington’s dentist). There are more serious misconceptions out there, however, and we come across one of them in our Gospel reading for this morning.

Jesus and his disciples were walking through the crowded, dusty streets of Jerusalem, when they came across a blind man crouched down by a wall, holding out his begging bowl. I suspect that the disciples were inclined to ignore the man. Perhaps they were not even conscious of him, as such people were commonplace, especially in Jerusalem. It was Jesus who noticed him, and that prompted the disciples to ask a question. “Rabbi,” they asked, “who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Who sinned?

Jesus’ followers were living under the impression that disease and physical impairment were somehow tied to an individual’s sin. That notion was not something that they had come up with on their own. It was not uncommon in their day and was even promulgated by some of the rabbis of the time. Today such a perspective seems intolerably cruel to us—as though a disability were not enough to suffer from, much less the guilt that it might be the result of some sin that I might have committed even before my birth.

Yet I dare say that there are probably just as many misunderstandings and hang-ups about sin today. Sad to say, the word “sin” has often been used by religious people as a stick to beat others down, to exclude them, even to dehumanize them. Yet, deep within all of us (if we are prepared to admit it) there is a nagging sense that things are not as they should be. As someone said to me years ago, “I don’t know about you, John, but if there is a video of my life, I don’t ever want to see it.” How important it is that we shed ourselves of dangerous misconceptions in something that is so pervasive, so central to our lives—that we come to a true biblical understanding of what sin really is.

I have been tremendously helped in that respect by a book by contemporary American theologian Neal Plantinga, and I am going to ask your forgiveness for reading to you a rather long quotation from it. He begins by quoting biographer Harry Wills, who wrote,

We are hostages to each other in a deadly interrelatedness. There is no “clean slate” of nature unscribbled on by all one’s forebears… At one time a woman of unsavory enough experience was delicately but cruelly referred to as ‘having a past’. The doctrine of original sin states that humankind, in exactly that sense, ‘has a past’.

Then Plantinga continues,

But, of course, our past also includes saints, civilizations, generous laws for gleaners, hospices, relief agencies, virtuoso peacemakers, and rural traditions of pitching in at a neighbor’s barn raising… It includes exultant worship, fifty-year wedding anniversaries, and, on some May mornings, a sense of life’s sweetness and of God’s goodness so sharp that we want to cry out from the sheer promise of it. Evil rolls across the ages, but so does good. Good has its own momentum. Corruption never wholly succeeds. (Even blasphemers acknowledge God.) Creation is stronger than sin and grace stronger still. Creation and grace are anvils that have worn out a lot of our hammers.

To speak of sin … apart from the realities of creation and grace, is to forget the resolve of God. God wants shalom and will pay any price to get it back. Human sin is stubborn, but not as stubborn as the grace of God and not half so persistent, not half so ready to suffer to win its way. Moreover, to speak of sin by itself is to misunderstand its nature: sin is only a parasite, a vandal, a spoiler. Sinful life is a partly depressing, partly ludicrous caricature of genuine human life. To concentrate on our rebellion, defection, and folly … is to forget that the center of the Christian religion is not our sin but our Savior. To speak of sin without grace is to minimize the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the fruit of the Spirit, and the hope of shalom.

But to speak of grace without sin is surely no better. To do this is to trivialize the cross of Jesus Christ, to skate past all the struggling by good people down the ages to forgive, accept, and rehabilitate sinners, including themselves, and therefore to cheapen the grace of God that always comes to us with blood on it. What had we thought the ripping and writhing on Golgotha were all about? To speak of grace without looking squarely at these realities, without painfully honest acknowledgment of our own sin and its effects, is to shrink grace to a mere embellishment of the music of creation… In short, for the Christian church … to ignore, euphemize, or otherwise mute the lethal reality of sin is to cut the nerve of the gospel. For the sober truth is that without full disclosure on sin, the gospel of grace becomes impertinent, unnecessary, and finally uninteresting.[1]

… that God’s works might be revealed in him

How important it is that we not ignore sin or trivialize it, and at the same time not be obsessed by it. The disciples’ were mistaken in connecting the man’s blindness with any sin. Jesus, on the other hand, was able to look upon both the man and his disability in an entirely different manner. Read literally from the Greek, his words in verse 3 were, “Neither this man sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God might be revealed in him.”

What did Jesus mean by this? I don’t believe that Jesus said what he did merely in anticipation of the miracle that he was about to perform. I believe that he was seeking to share a much deeper truth with his disciples. That was that this man, even in his blindness, crouched by the wall and covered in the dust from people’s sandals, either ignored or pitied by passers-by, was made in the image and likeness of God. Jesus was able to see in him a nobility that was invisible to the disciples—and that was a characteristic of his ministry. As we saw last week, he spoke with respect to a Samaritan woman. He welcomed children into his presence when his disciples regarded them as nothing but a nuisance. He honored the selfless act of a prostitute. He reached out and touched a leper who may not have felt the warmth of human contact for years. He invited himself into the home of a corrupt and hated tax collector.

The man who sat by the side of the road and begged was blind. Yet Jesus’ disciples suffered from another form of blindness in their inability to perceive the image of God in him. One of the challenges to me in this passage is to develop our senses so that we can see people as Jesus did, as men and women and children who bear the image of God and in whom God’s beauty dwells. Again and again I have found myself being rebuked in this area—by blind people who were able to see in ways that I could never imagine, developmentally disabled people who were able to respond to the love of God in ways that were beautifully uncomplicated yet more profound than anything I can express, physically handicapped people who showed a strength of character and determination that staggers me.

All through his ministry the apostle Paul suffered from a disability. He called it his “thorn in the flesh” and I can only imagine that it was the cause of much pain and sorrow for him. “Three times I appealed to the Lord about this …,” he wrote to his friends in Corinth, “but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’ So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me… For whenever I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:8-10).

Blindness and sight

We would have missed the point of this passage if we left it without observing one more lesson, however. It has to do with blindness and sight. We have seen already the physical blindness of the man who sat by the road. And I have alluded to the blindness of the disciples who were unable to see God’s image in him. Yet as the passage continues we are exposed to a deeper and more pernicious blindness: the blindness of those who cannot see and yet willfully insist that they do.

It is such a monstrous irony that the very people who should have been praising God for the miracle that had been done in the blind man’s life were the ones who spoke with scorn and condemnation. What was it that motivated them to treat the newly healed man with such contempt? Were they jealous that they could not perform such acts of healing—or perhaps that they were not the beneficiaries of them? I believe that ultimately it was an insistence on their own rightness. This is the root of the condemnation that the risen, glorified Christ levels against the church in Laodicea in the book of Revelation:

You say, ‘I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.’ You do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. Therefore I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may be rich; and white robes to clothe you and to keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen; and salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see. I reprove and discipline those whom I love. Be earnest, therefore, and repent.

The man born blind had spent all his life depending on others. He depended on his parents to house and feed him. He depended on friends to lead him to and from his begging place on the street. He depended on passers-by to toss their spare change into his bowl. He was painfully aware of his incompleteness, of his need for healing; and when Jesus offered him the opportunity to be made whole, he leapt at the chance.

All of which brings us back to where we began. If we are to receive the healing that Jesus offers, it will not come by ignoring our sins or hiding them, or pretending that they don’t exist or don’t matter. It will come as we acknowledge them, as we willingly receive the forgiveness, cleansing and restoration that Jesus holds out to you and to me from the cross.

---

[1]     Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be, 198,199

Bible Study: A Blind Man (John 9:1-41)

Getting started

Try to imagine what life would be like for you if you were unable to see.

Exploring God’s word

1    Read John 9:1-12, assigning parts for the disciples, Jesus, the neighbors and the blind man. What question does seeing the blind man prompt among the disciples? Why would they think this way? What is the problem with this kind of reasoning?

2    What does Jesus have to say about the man’s disability? How do you interpret his statement? What does he mean by “day” and “night”? What claim does he make for himself?

3    What does Jesus do for the man? What part do you consider faith may have played in his healing? How does he demonstrate his faith?

4    Continue with verses 13 to 34. Why did the Pharisees have a problem with the man’s healing? To what conclusion about Jesus did this lead some of them? To what conclusion do they try to force the man who had been blind in verse 25? What can we learn from his response?

5    Turn to verses 35 to 41. Take a moment to trace the development of the blind man’s awareness of Jesus. How does Jesus interpret this whole incident in verse 39? How would you define spiritual blindness? What makes it so dangerous?

For further thought and action

Do you think it is possible for Christians to be spiritually blind? How does this happen? What is the remedy?

Sermon – “A Samaritan Woman” (John 4:5-14)

Our Gospel reading this morning takes us to a well near the town of Sychar in Samaria. Sychar is modern-day Nablus in the Palestinian territories, about forty miles north of Jerusalem by road. To this day it remains the principal home of the few hundred remaining Samaritans in the world. And Jacob’s well is still there, one of the best-attested archeological sites in Israel.

Today it may be found in the crypt (for you cradle Episcopalians that’s an undercroft) of a Greek Orthodox monastery. The water table that feeds the well runs more than sixty feet below the valley floor, with the result that it offers much better water than the harder water from the springs on the neighboring slopes of Mt Gerizim. With the accumulation of town debris and older sites going back nearly four thousand years, the current site is an additional sixty feet or so higher. The woman of Samaria wasn’t straying from the truth when she said, “The well is deep.” She would have had to let her bucket down anything from a hundred to a hundred fifty feet to reach water. Think of it: that’s the height of a ten- to fifteen-story building. However, the connection with Jacob, and its quality of water would have made it worth the effort.

New Testament Sychar is also Old Testament Shechem. In terms of historical importance for Israel, Shechem was probably second only to Jerusalem. It was at Shechem that the Lord first gave Abraham the promise, as he journeyed from Haran, “To your offspring I will give this land” (Genesis 12:7). It was at Shechem that the people of Israel renewed their covenant to the Lord under Joshua, proclaiming, “The Lord our God we will serve, and him we will obey” (Joshua 24:24). It was at Shechem that Solomon’s son Rehoboam was crowned as king and made the fateful declaration that split the nation in two: “My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions” (1 Kings 12:1-19). “A more interesting neighborhood it is difficult to imagine,” wrote Bishop J.C. Ryle a century and a half ago. “Whichever way the eye of a weary traveler looked, he would see something to remind him of Israel’s history.”[1]

Ryle’s contemporary, biblical scholar and preacher Alfred Edersheim, wrote of the area,

There is not a district in the Land of Promise which presents a scene more fair or rich than the plain of Samaria. As we stand on the summit of the ridge, the eye travels over the wide sweep, extending more than seven miles northward, till it rests on the twin heights of Gerizim and Ebal, which enclose the valley of Shechem. Following the straight olive-shaded road from the south, we stand by that Well of Jacob to which so many sacred memories attach.[2]

I fear that Edersheim’s description may be somewhat romanticized. Certainly in Jesus’ time Shechem, or what was left of it, could hardly have been an attractive sight. More than a century previously, a Jewish army under the leadership of John Hyrcanus had destroyed the city and its temple atop Mt Gerizim, never to be rebuilt. And so I imagine Sychar as a few destitute villagers living among derelict heaps of ruins.

Besides that, from May to October in that part of the world there is virtually no rain or even any cloud cover, with temperatures climbing much of the time well into the 90s. If Jesus’ journey from Judea to Galilee took place during those months, it is not difficult to understand how he would have arrived at the well parched and exhausted.

Jesus and his weakness

Thus our gospel story begins with a picture of Jesus’ humanity. It is in fact the first glimpse of Jesus’ humanity that we have in the Gospel of John. Remember that John introduces Jesus as the eternal Word, who was with God, who was God, through whom all things came into being. In John’s gospel there are no stories of Mary’s pregnancy or of the humble birth in Bethlehem. Before the first chapter has ended, we hear Jesus being proclaimed as the Son of God, the King of Israel, and Jesus himself declaring, “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man” (John 1:51). And in the following chapter Jesus turns water into wine and John remarks, “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him” (John 2:11).

As we open chapter 4, it is a very different picture of Jesus that we get. Sweat penetrating through his robes and beading on his forehead, panting for breath, Jesus virtually collapses by the well, while his disciples carry on into the village to look for food. Many people today have problems believing in the deity of Jesus. They like to think of him as a great teacher, perhaps the greatest the world has ever known. They picture him as a good and virtuous man. But God? No. That’s taking it too far.

As orthodox Christians we take the opposite stand. We love to quote C.S. Lewis, who wrote,

You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.[3]

However, our defense of Jesus’ deity can come at the risk of not really believing in his humanity. I am grateful for the teaching of Bishop John Howe at our Quiet Day a couple of weeks ago, who reminded us that Jesus’ miracles were the result not of his being the divine Son of God, but of his being anointed by the Holy Spirit at his baptism. Yes, Jesus is the Son of God. That is an article that I affirm with all my heart. But he was also a human being like you and me. He developed as a tiny fetus within his mother’s womb and was born with all the pain and mess that that entails. He developed physically, emotionally, socially and spiritually. He got hungry and thirsty. He was tired, indeed exhausted to the point where a storm at sea couldn’t wake him. He became angry. There were things he didn’t know. He felt pain of body and anguish of soul—and even the absence of God.

Indeed it is in his humanity as much as in his deity that Jesus is able to minister to us. He is the high priest who is able to stand alongside us in our weakness, because he has been tested in every way just as we are. And it was in his humanity that Jesus was able to minister to a woman who at that moment came with her bucket to draw water.

Jesus and the woman

What ensues is a remarkable conversation, made all the more remarkable because it never should have taken place on two counts. First she was a Samaritan. The centuries-old hostility between Jews and Samaritans would have been evident in the parched rubble of Shechem not much more than a stone’s throw away. That long-standing enmity is evident in a passage from the book of Sirach in the Apocrypha:

Two nations my soul detests
and the third is not even a people:
Those who live in Seir, and the Philistines,
and the foolish people that live in Shechem.[4]

The second reason was that she was a woman. Yet in spite of what could easily have been two insurmountable barriers, Jesus not only speaks with her but treats her as every bit his equal. It seems to me that the verbal sparring in which they engage is a sign of respect on Jesus’ part: she is one who can well stand up to a challenge. We see the same dynamic in the exchange between Jesus and a Canaanite woman who came to him on behalf of her demon-possessed daughter. When Jesus at first demurred, she came back with the retort, “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.” To which Jesus replied, “Woman, great is your faith” (Matthew 15:22-28).

The fact is that Jesus chose to consort with some of the most unlikely people. That was the substance of the criticism that people repeatedly leveled against him—that he was “a friend of tax collectors and sinners”. And that is exactly what he was. That was his intention. When they came back with their food, the disciples were shocked to see Jesus seriously engaging with this woman—to the point where they were at a loss for words. Perhaps they had already heard something about her sordid life while they were in the village. Yet had they only taken a moment to look at themselves, they might have realized what an unlikely group they themselves were. Jesus was not out to form a club. He came to draw men and women into the reign of God and to make that reign a reality in our world. The barriers that we erect of race and gender, of education and socioeconomic status, of politics and nationality, mean nothing to him. The apostle Paul summed it up when he wrote, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

Jesus and the well

It seems to me that by the end of the conversation the Samaritan woman had begun to understand all of that. Already she had begun to drink from those unending streams of living water. Already she felt a freshness welling up within her that had never been part of her life before. In the words of Horatius Bonar’s hymn,

I heard the voice of Jesus say,
‘Behold, I freely give
the living water; thirsty one,
stoop down and drink, and live’:
I came to Jesus, and I drank
of that life-giving stream;
my thirst was quenched, my soul revived,
and now I live in him.

The proof was in the fact that all she could think of doing was to rush away and tell the other people in the village what she had experienced—to the point where she left her precious bucket behind at the side of the well. “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Messiah?”

You see—that’s the thing about the living water. If you’ve really had a taste of it, it’s something you can’t keep to yourself. As much as we might like to, as much as we might be tempted to, we cannot wall it in. The streams of living water will always well up and burst their bounds—and the one who gives them is not only the one who came to the woman at the well, asking, “Give me a drink.” He is also the one who cried out for you and for me and for all humankind, “I thirst…” (John 19:28).

---

[1]     Expository Thoughts on the Gospels: John, Vol. 1, 196

[2]     The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (1883)

[3]     Mere Christianity, 52,53

[4]     Sirach 50:25,26