Easter 7
Jn
15:26-16:4
5/17/26
“I have said all these things to
you to keep you from falling away. They will put you out of the synagogues.
Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is
offering service to God.” That’s what Jesus says in our Gospel lesson this
morning.
Now
it would seem that if you are trying to gather people into your group, and
preparing them for the time when you will no longer be visibly present with
them, this is not the best way to go about doing it. It doesn’t seem helpful to say: “Hey guys,
they are going to ostracize you completely. In fact, when someone kills you
they are going to think that they are offering service to God.”
Yet
that is exactly what Jesus says this morning. Then he explains why this will
happen when he says, “And they will do these things because they have not
known the Father, nor me.” According to
the Lord, everything comes down to knowing the Father and knowing Jesus. And so
this morning we want to consider why this is so. We need to examine why people
don’t know them, and why we do. And in light of this we can then understand why
these words of Jesus are not something that should turn us away.
At
the very beginning of his Gospel, John throws us into the deep end of the pool.
He says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were
made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.”
The reference to “in the
beginning” clearly identifies that we are talking about Yahweh, the God of
Israel, and his act of creation. And if there is one thing the Old Testament
makes clear it is the fact that Yahweh is one. We learn in Deuteronomy, “Hear, O
Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” The Lord is one, and he is the
only God – the Creator of heaven and earth. All other so-called gods are
nothing.
Yet John also refers to the
“Word,” and in the rest of the Gospel we learn that the Word is the Son of God.
Without ever denying the fact that God is one, John tells us that the Word
is God. In fact, all things were made through him.
We learn that Father sent the Son
into the world. As John tells us, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
And through Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, we begin to learn more about the
Father and the Son. Although distinct
from one another, we learn that Father and Son are also united in some way.
Jesus tells the Jews that they should believe his works “that you may know and
understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.” Christ just
comes out and declares, “I and the Father are one.”
While Jesus reveals that he and
the Father are one, he also makes it clear that the Father has sent him into
the world to carry out a mission. He has spoken what the Father wants made
known. Jesus says, “For I have not spoken on my own authority, but the
Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment—what to say and
what to speak.”
And Jesus reveals that he is doing
that the Father has sent him to do. He said, “For this reason the Father loves
me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one
takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have
authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This
charge I have received from my Father.”
Jesus lay down his life by being
lifted up on the cross. We learn that this was an act of love for us by God the
Father. In chapter three we read, “For God loved the world in this
way, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should
not perish but have eternal life.” This giving of the Son on the cross was
necessary so that we would not perish.
The reason for this is our sin.
God is the holy God. Though created for fellowship with God, through Adam’s sin
we were all plunged into sin. Now the flesh, fallen sinful nature, brings forth
more flesh – more fallen sinful nature. And we do as we are. We just confessed
using the words of First John: “If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves,
and the truth is not in us.”
God is the holy and just God. But
in love for us he sent his Son as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the
world. As Isaiah said, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have
turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity
of us all.”
Christ received the judgment
against our sin. He cried out “It is finished” as he died on the cross. But
this was not end of God’s saving work. He had sent the Son to lay down his
life. And he had sent him to take it up again. This is what Jesus did on Easter
when he rose from the dead. By his resurrection Christ has conquered death and
restored us to life. We now have life with God – a life that death cannot end.
And it is a life that will be resurrection life when Christ returns on the Last
Day and raises our bodies.
Jesus, the Son of God, is the
revelation of God’s saving love. Johns says in the prologue: “No one has ever
seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made
him known.” Jesus declared, “Whoever
believes in me, believes not in me but in him who sent me.
And whoever sees me sees him who sent me.” When Philip said,
“Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us,” Christ replied, “Have
I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has
seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?”
You know Jesus, the crucified and
risen Lord, and so you know the Father. Baptized into Christ you have been born
again of water and the Spirit. Your sins have been washed away. John says in
his first letter, “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that
we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason
why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved,
we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet
appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him,
because we shall see him as he is.”
We are the children of God because
of Christ. Because this is so we are no longer part of the world - this age
that is ruled by Satan and sin. We once
were. As Paul told the Ephesians we “were by nature children of wrath,
like the rest of mankind.” But God called us as his own through the work of the
Spirit. This was not our doing. It was God’s. Jesus said, “No one can come to
me unless the Father who sent me draws him.”
In our text Jesus says, “I have
said all these things to you to keep you from falling away. They will put you
out of the synagogues. Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills
you will think he is offering service to God.” Christ explains that we will
receive this treatment because we belong to him. Just before our text he said,
“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you
were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you
are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world
hates you.”
Thankfully, we do not live in
place like Sudan or Nigeria where Muslims kill Christians because they believe
in Jesus, and think that they are serving God in doing so. But we do face
social pressures against Christ and his word. The institutions of media,
entertainment, and education treat Christianity as if it is benighted vestige
of the past to which no thinking person would belong. Jesus’ own assertion that
he alone is the way to Father receives condemnation because it is “not
inclusive.” To even talk about sin – much less to identify particular sins on
the basis of God’s word such as fornication and homosexuality – brings the
world’s hatred. We are told that you can have your Christian faith in private,
but don’t talk about it out in the world.
These challenges are real. And the
point of our text is that Jesus said it would be this way. But we are willing
to take up our cross in whatever form it takes and follow Jesus because through
him we are children of God. We do have life – a life that death cannot end, and
that will be resurrection life on the Last Day. For as Jesus said, “In this
world you will have tribulation. But take heart. I have overcome the world.”
If we are to continue in the faith
while facing this opposition, we need to be sustained. And we find the source
of this in our text as Jesus says, “But when the Helper comes, whom I will
send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the
Father, he will bear witness about me. And you also will bear
witness, because you have been with me from the beginning.”
The ascended Lord has sent forth
the Spirit as he promised. He bears witness about Jesus as he takes what
belongs to our Lord and makes it known to us. Jesus had promised earlier, “But
the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my
name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all
that I have said to you.”
In the Scriptures we encounter
this inspired witness. These words are never mere words because they are the
Spirit breathed words as he guided the authors so that what was written is what
the Spirit has given to us. They are
words through which the Spirit continues to be at work to create faith in
Christ and to sustain it.
And so there is the need to read
them daily at home. There is the need to read them in devotions with our
children. And we need to do what you are doing at this very moment – to come to
church to hear the word read and proclaimed by Christ’s Office of the Ministry.
This is how Christ enables us to
live as God’s children in the midst of a world that is hostile to him, and
therefore to us. We do so because of the blessing that we have received in
Christ. He is the saving revelation by
which we have come to know the Father. In him we have forgiveness and life
which will have no end.
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