John's Jesus
How Things Work – Consideration #135 (Book II Science & Religion)
Be A Part of the Conversation!
Tuesday May 14, 2024
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
John 13:34-35
PREFACE
Welcome Everybody!
In the Gospel of John, something as simple as asking for a drink of water becomes an opportunity for Jesus to reveal himself and share the secrets of the Kingdom. He also clarifies that he, and his message, are not possible without the Jewish tradition. If there had been no Judaism, there would be no Jesus. Judaism, the original covenant between God and Abraham; was the prerequisite for his possibility. Moses brought God’s Law to the Israelites; Jesus brought God’s Truth to the world.
When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)
The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews did not associate with Samaritans.)
Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”
Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water...”
The woman begins to understand that Jesus is no ordinary man. However, she protests that Jesus and other Jews insist that God can only be worshipped at the temple in Jerusalem. Essentially keeping average people from having a real relationship with God.
“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”
In his response Jesus suggests that soon all of that will be over and God will be worshipped everywhere by everyone. However, he also re-establishes Israel’s role in the divine plan while declaring a fundamental shift in focus from the law to the spirit, transcending empirical law into divine revelation, or truth.
“Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
This is generally considered to be a prophecy regarding the fall of Jerusalem and the birth of Christianity. The key to this new perspective of reality is not limited by the empirical law, it is a reality based on the rational concepts of spirit and truth.
The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”
Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”
John 4: 1-26
As is common in the Gospel of John, Jesus directly reveals himself openly to the woman. He is the light that reveals the truth that all sincere seekers of God are actively searching for in their life, the physical incarnation of the logos.
CONSIDERATION #135 – John’s Jesus
Even in more “traditional” healing stories, John imparts a degree of understanding not always seen in the synoptic gospels. In John, a powerful Jesus purposely seeks out the most difficult person to heal he can find. However, the hypocrisy that follows highlights the real purpose of his message.
The prophecy of Simeon that Jesus would “reveal the hearts of many” in Israel is born out in this story. The reaction by the Jewish leaders to the miracle Jesus performs reveals their total ignorance of the word and the falseness of their own hearts.
Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals. Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?”
John 5: 1-6
What the man says to Jesus is important. The man expresses that he has been seeking to be healed by the power of the sacred pool but was too weak and crippled to reach it on his own; and no one would help him to reach it, some even pushing him out of the way to get there first themselves.
For Jesus, this is a proclamation of faith by the invalid and a judgement of hypocrisy and arrogance for those who increase the suffering of others on the earth. Particularly the completely unsympathetic response by the Jewish leaders to the man who had just been healed. Proof that they had neither spiritual understanding, nor intention.
“Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.”
Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.
The day on which this took place was a Sabbath, and so the Jewish leaders said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath; the law forbids you to carry your mat.”
But he replied, “The man who made me well said to me, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.’”
So they asked him, “Who is this fellow who told you to pick it up and walk?”
The man who was healed had no idea who it was, for Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there.
John 5: 7-13
The idea that the reaction to an invalid of thirty-eight years who had just been healed was, “Why are you carrying a mat on the Sabbath!” encapsulates and epitomizes the essential spiritual misunderstanding and hypocrisy of the Jewish leaders. Jesus recognizes that their arrogance and righteousness has blinded them to the light. They acknowledge and adhere to what supports their power and authority, while ignoring the signs that point to the truth.
“If I testify about myself, my testimony is not true. There is another who testifies in my favor, and I know that his testimony about me is true.
You have sent to John and he has testified to the truth. Not that I accept human testimony; but I mention it that you may be saved. John was a lamp that burned and gave light, and you chose for a time to enjoy his light.
I have testimony weightier than that of John. For the works that the Father has given me to finish—the very works that I am doing—testify that the Father has sent me. And the Father who sent me has himself testified concerning me. You have never heard his voice nor seen his form, nor does his word dwell in you, for you do not believe the one he sent. You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.
I do not accept glory from human beings, but I know you. I know that you do not have the love of God in your hearts. I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not accept me; but if someone else comes in his own name, you will accept him. How can you believe since you accept glory from one another but do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?
But do not think I will accuse you before the Father. Your accuser is Moses, on whom your hopes are set. If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?”
John 5: 31-47
Essentially, Jesus is telling them that despite their strict adherence to the Law as a means to obtain righteousness, they had missed the point.
POSTSCRIPT
In John, Jesus demonstrates the power of forgiveness as opposed to the dogma of the law in one of Jesus’ most famous and demonstrative stories. Once again, John shows us the divine nature of Jesus in his answer to a crowd who is demanding the exact letter of the law as the appropriate penalty for sin.
At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.
But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.
At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
“No one, sir,” she said.
“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”
John 8: 1-11
In this narrative about judgement Jesus proposes that in terms of sin the first step is self-judgment. Jesus does not condone the woman’s sin, however, he does condemn the rush to judgement by the crowd. The woman was “caught in the act” of sin, however, just because you are “not caught” does not mean that you have not sinned. In addition, there was a depraved joy in the judgement and its execution; they were anxious to kill this woman. She was no longer even human to them, she was just another tool to be used in their argument against Jesus.
Once Jesus forces the crowd into self-judgement it forces them to back down from their initial intent to “manifest justice.” After those demanding condemnation had retreated, the final judgement is left to Jesus. He pardons her, with an exhortation to give up her life of sin. In this story John provides an empirical example of Jesus’ admonition from the Gospel of Matthew.
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
Matthew 7:3-5
According to John, in the Kingdom of Heaven the limitation of sin is replaced with the revelation of love; in the empirical world sin is punished based on judgement under the law. Jesus is not arguing for sin or against the law; he is arguing that the limitations of empirical reality can be transcended through a rationality called the Kingdom of Heaven. In a reality in which love replaces sin there is no need for justice; because there is no longer any sin.
Essentially, Jesus is arguing that God wants more from human beings than to just simply follow the law, God wants human beings to love one another, therebye, eliminating any necessity for the law. The Kingdom of Heaven does not replace the law; it transcends the law.
Next week we consider John’s understanding of Jesus’ miracles…
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