PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: “ETERNAL LIFE: FROM GRACE TO GLORY”- The message of the First Epistle of John
“Suppose we hear an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation . . . would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. . . . Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre”. (G. K. CHESTERTON). Such is the dilemma of trying to discover the real Jesus. One of my favorite writers, Philip Yancey, in his book The Jesus I Never Knew, shares what he discovered when he began to investigate the question-who is the real Jesus. He writes,
“I first got acquainted with Jesus when I was a child, singing ‘Jesus Loves Me’ in Sunday school, addressing bedtime prayers to ‘Dear Lord Jesus,’ watching Bible Club teachers move cutout figures across a flannel graph board. I associated Jesus with Kool-Aid and sugar cookies and gold stars for good attendance. I remember especially one image from Sunday school, an oil painting that hung on the concrete block wall. Jesus had long, flowing hair, unlike that of any man I knew. His face was thin and handsome, his skin waxen and milky white. He wore a robe of scarlet, and the artist had taken pains to show the play of light on its folds. In his arms, Jesus cradled a small sleeping lamb. I imagined myself as that lamb, blessed beyond all telling”. (Philip Yancey The Jesus I Never Knew). “Later, while attending a Bible college, I encountered a different image. A painting popular in those days depicted Jesus, hands outstretched, suspended in a Dali-like pose over the United Nations building in New York City. Here was the cosmic Christ, the One in whom all things adhere, the still point of the turning world. This world figure had come a long way from the lamb-toting shepherd of my childhood. Still, students spoke of the cosmic Jesus with a shocking intimacy. The faculty urged us to develop a ‘personal relationship with Jesus Christ,’ and in chapel services we hymned our love for him in most familiar terms. One song told about walking beside him in a garden with dew still on the roses. A little later, the decade of the 1960s (which actually reached me, along with most of the church, in the early 1970s) called everything into question. Jesus freaks—the very term would have been an oxymoron in the tranquil 1950s—suddenly appeared on the scene, as if deposited there by extraterrestrials. No longer were Jesus’ followers well-scrubbed representatives of the middle class; some were unkempt, disheveled radicals. Liberation theologians began enshrining Jesus on posters in a troika along with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. It dawned on me that virtually all portrayals of Jesus, including the Good Shepherd of my Sunday school and the United Nations Jesus of my Bible College showed him wearing a mustache and beard, both of which were strictly banned from the Bible College. Questions now loomed that had never occurred to me in childhood. For example, how would telling people to be nice to one another get a man crucified? What government would execute Mister Rogers or Captain Kangaroo? In physical appearance, Jesus favored those who would have been kicked out of Bible College and rejected by most churches. Among his contemporaries he somehow gained a reputation as ‘a wine-bibber and a glutton.’ Those in authority, whether religious or political, regarded him as a troublemaker, a disturber of the peace. He spoke and acted like a revolutionary, scorning fame, family, property, and other traditional measures of success. Today, people even use Jesus’ name to curse by. How strange it would sound if, when a businessman missed a golf putt, he yelled, ‘Thomas Jefferson!’ or if a plumber screamed ‘Mahatma Gandhi!’ when his pipe wrench mashed a finger. We cannot get away from this man Jesus”.
“More than 1900 years later,” said H. G. Wells, “a historian like myself, who doesn’t even call himself a Christian, finds the picture centering irresistibly around the life and character of this most significant man. . . .The historian’s test of an individual’s greatness is ‘What did he leave to grow?’ Did he start men to thinking along fresh lines with a vigor that persisted after him? By this test Jesus stands first.” You can gauge the size of a ship that has passed out of sight by the huge wake it leaves behind. Jesus left a very big wake! Yet we view Jesus from our own context and perspective. William Blake brought this out in his poem. ‘The vision of Christ that thou dost see is my vision’s greatest enemy: Thine has a great hook nose like thine, mine has a snub nose like to mine. . . . Both read the Bible day and night, But thou read’st black where I read white’ (WILLIAM BLAKE).
But the more I studied Jesus the more of an enigma He became. Jesus, I found, bore little resemblance to the Mister Rogers figure I had met in Sunday school, and was remarkably unlike the person I had studied in Bible College. For one thing, he was far less tame. In my prior image, I realized, Jesus’ personality matched that of a Star Trek Vulcan: he remained calm, cool, and collected as he strode like a robot among excitable human beings on spaceship earth. That is not what I found portrayed in the Gospels. Other people affected Jesus deeply: obstinacy frustrated him, self-righteousness infuriated him, simple faith thrilled him. Indeed, he seemed more emotional and spontaneous than the average person, not less. More passionate, not less.
The more I studied Jesus, the more difficult it became to pigeonhole him. He said little about the Roman occupation, the main topic of conversation among his countrymen, and yet he took up a whip to drive petty profiteers from the Jewish temple. He urged obedience to the Mosaic Law while acquiring the reputation as a lawbreaker. He could be stabbed by sympathy for a stranger, yet turn on his best friend with the flinty rebuke, “Get behind me, Satan!” He had uncompromising views on rich men and loose women, yet both types enjoyed his company.
One day miracles seemed to flow out of Jesus; the next day his power was blocked by people’s lack of faith. One day he talked in detail of the Second Coming; another, he knew neither the day nor hour. He fled from arrest at one point and marched inexorably toward it at another. He spoke eloquently about peacemaking, then told his disciples to procure swords. His extravagant claims about himself kept him at the center of controversy, but when he did something truly miraculous he tended to hush it up. As Walter Wink has said,’ if Jesus had never lived, we would not have been able to invent him’.
Two words one could never think of applying to the Jesus of the Gospels: boring and predictable. How is it, then, that the church has tamed such a character—has, in Dorothy Sayers’ words, “The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore – on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him ‘meek and mile,’ and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.”
John wrote his gospel to show that Jesus was the Son of God that people might believe in Him and have eternal life as a result of their faith. (See John 20:30-31). John wrote his first epistle to those who had already believed in Jesus, and had eternal life (See I John 5:13). John was writing to define that eternal life. It would be seen as a shared life, (koinonia) where Jesus incarnates His life into the believer, transforming him from grace to glory, manifesting itself in life, in contrast to death, liberty, in contrast to bondage, light in contrast to darkness and error, and finally love, in contrast to hate. John, in his Gospel, speaks of Jesus “becoming flesh and dwelling among us, and we beheld Glory, that of the only begotten of the Father, full of Grace and Truth” (John 1:14). Then he begins his epistle telling those who believe in Jesus that his joy would not be full until he is confident that all of them are experiencing the eternal life, that will manifest itself by displaying the life, light, liberty, and love of the life of Christ, in our lives, for all the world to see! One of the key verses in I John is I John 4:13 which says, “As He is, so are we, in the world!” False teachers of the day, Gnostics, were teaching versions of Jesus, and of God the Father, and of Salvation that was error! John called it the “spirit of Antichrist”. In his letter he defines the nature of the “real Jesus”. This real Jesus was a manifestation of His Father, the true, real, and living God. A “real Christian” is one who fleshes out the “eternal life” residing in him by the indwelling Christ. During the next several weeks we are going to see what that really means during our series of message from I John.
The great writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky found Jesus as his Savior, while in a prison camp in Russia. He fell deeply in love with Jesus. In the following quotes he talks of how Jesus was the answer to his search for how to become a “real man”, and shares how he would love Jesus come what may. “To study the meaning of man and of life — I am making significant progress here. I have faith in myself. Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man”. (Personal correspondence (1839), as quoted in Dostoevsky: His Life and Work (1971) by Konstantin Mochulski, as translated by Michael A. Minihan, p. 17) “I want to say to you, about myself, that I am a child of this age, a child of unfaith and skepticism, and probably (indeed I know it) shall remain so to the end of my life. How dreadfully has it tormented me (and torments me even now) this longing for faith, which is all the stronger for the proofs I have against it. And yet God gives me sometimes moments of perfect peace; in such moments I love and believe that I am loved; in such moments I have formulated my creed, wherein all is clear and holy to me. This creed is extremely simple; here it is: I believe that there is nothing lovelier, deeper, more sympathetic, more rational, more manly, and more perfect than the Savior; I say to myself with jealous love that not only is there no one else like Him, but that there could be no one. I would even say more: If anyone could prove to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth really did exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ and not with truth”. (Letter To Mme. N. D. Fonvisin (1854), as published in Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to his Family and Friends (1914), translated by Ethel Golburn Mayne, Letter XXI, p. 71). If we could come to that kind of resolve at the end of these series of messages-as John told his Church members-“my joy would be full!” Amen!
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.