Tag: Emmanuel

Advent, The Prologue and Relationships: 4 Jesus and Moses (John 1:1-18)

John 1:1-18

Moses isn’t the first Old Testament character that comes to our mind at Christmas, I’ll give you that. Maybe we think of Isaiah prophesying the virgin birth or the One who is called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, and Prince of Peace. We might remember Micah and his prophecy that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, which Herod’s advisers quote when the Magi show up.

But Moses?

Well, John seems to think it’s worth contrasting Jesus with Moses at the end of our great passage. Hear verses 14 to 18 again:

14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

15 (John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, ‘This is the one I spoke about when I said, “He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.”’) 16 Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. 17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in the closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.

Why didn’t I just read verse 17, which is the only verse here that explicitly mentions Moses? Because even when he’s not named, John is alluding to him. And by doing so, John tells us more about what the Good News of Jesus is.

I’m going back to three episodes in Moses’ life that John has in mind and we’ll see how the comparison and contrast with Jesus tells us about the wonder of the Incarnation.

Firstly, we go to the wilderness:

14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

When we read, ‘The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us,’ the English ‘made his dwelling’ if translated more literally would be ‘tabernacled’ Jesus tabernacled among us. Why is that significant?

Do you remember the tabernacle that Moses was instructed to get Israel to construct? It was the dwelling-place of God’s presence that the Israelites carried with them in the wilderness. And indeed it remained so until the Temple was built, centuries later, in Jerusalem.

The tabernacle was the portable presence of God. When John says that Jesus tabernacled among us, he is telling us that in coming to earth Jesus is the very presence of God with us. He wasn’t just some prophet. He was the very presence of God in the midst of human life.

We do not believe in a God who has stayed remote from us. Contrary to the Julie Gold/Nanci Griffith song that Cliff Richard covered, God is not simply watching us from a distance. God has traversed the distance and in Jesus he is Emmanuel, God with us. He knows what it is to live the human life with all its joys and struggles. He is not an ivory tower God.

When we struggle with suffering or injustice, Jesus has lived it. This is what he came to do. As I often say at funerals, when I go through a bad experience in life, the people who come up with the clever answers that explain my predicament are no help. They are as smug as Job’s comforters. But those who have walked the road I am on, and who come alongside me – they make a difference. So it is with Jesus.

One simple example from my life: a few years before I met Debbie, I had a broken engagement. (Or a narrow escape, as my sister called it. I married the right woman in the end!) One day, when I was particularly down, two friends of mine, Sue and Kate, rang the doorbell and said, “We’re taking you out to lunch.” What I discovered over lunch was their own histories of broken relationships.

Jesus tabernacled among us. He understands. He is still present with us by the Holy Spirit. Hear the Good News of Christmas that the Son of God tabernacled among us. He is Emmanuel, God with us.

And it’s the model for the way we spread that Good News. For after the Resurrection, Jesus told his disciples,

As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you. (John 20:21)

So the way we begin sharing the Gospel is by openly living for Christ in the midst of those who do not yet believe. We do not go on helicopter raids to bring people in, we start by going among other people, living our Christian lives before them. This is what Jesus himself, the Word made flesh, did, when he tabernacled among us. So too us.

In one town where I ministered, some Christians left the local United Reformed Church and said they were going to start a new church on a deprived estate. They hired a hall there for meetings. But did any of them move to the estate and live out their faith among the people they were supposedly going to evangelise? No.

The Word was made flesh and tabernacled among us. It is Good News for us in all that life throws at us, and it is the model for us sharing that Good News even today.

Secondly, let’s look generally at the exodus and for this we go to verse sixteen of John chapter one:

16 Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given.

Many people say that the Old Testament is about God’s Law and the New Testament is about God’s grace. Wrong! There is grace in the Old Testament. The New Testament tells us so, in verses like this. So when Jesus comes, his mission of grace builds on what has gone before and takes it to new levels.

In Moses’ case, grace is seen in the Exodus. God sees the suffering of his people in Egypt as they are enslaved, as Pharaoh worsens their already bad working conditions, as he attempts to have male Israelite babies killed.

The Israelites themselves are not perfect, but God in his mercy and grace will save them. Moses whom he calls to lead them is also far from perfect – in fact that’s an understatement, he’s a murderer. But in grace God calls him and mercifully redirects his passions.

Grace comes before anything we ever do for God. He acted in grace to deliver the Israelites from Egypt. And when Jesus comes, he does so to bring grace on a far greater scale, a cosmic scale, even. Yes, God is still interested in setting free people who are suffering due to the sins of others, but in Jesus he comes to do even more. He comes to set people free from their own sins. He comes to bring reconciliation not only with God but with one another. And he comes to heal broken creation. For when Jesus is raised from the dead, it will be the first fruits of God’s project to make all things new, even heaven and earth, as we learn in the Book of Revelation.

If from Moses and the wilderness we learn that Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, then from Moses and the Exodus, we learn that Jesus is – er – Jesus, the One who will save his people from their sins.

This tells us why the Word was made flesh and tabernacled among us. He came to bring this comprehensive salvation. To save us from what others do to us. To save us from what we do. To save creation from its brokenness.

Never let us reduce salvation to a personal and private forgiveness of my own sins which earns me my ticket to heaven. Yes, we do need our own sins forgiving, we do need to repent of them and put our faith in Jesus, but that is just the beginning. God saves us to involve is in the whole project of grace that Jesus heralded. We have a job to do, and Jesus is enlisting us in the ways of grace.

I love to tell the story of a keen young Christian who found himself on a train sharing a compartment with a man of the cloth dressed in a purple shirt, in other words a bishop. The young Christian had heard about these religious establishment figures and was sure the bishop would not have any vital experience of Christ, and so he said to him, ‘Bishop, are you saved?’

The bishop looked up and calmly replied, ‘Young man, do you mean have I been saved? Or do you mean am I being saved? Or do you mean will I be saved?’

Before the bemused young man could respond the bishop continued: ‘Because I have been saved – Jesus in his grace has forgiven my sins. I am being saved – Jesus by his grace is slowly making me more like him. And I will be saved – because one day there will be no more sin in this creation. I have been saved from the penalty of sin, I am being saved from the practice of sin, and I will be saved from the presence of sin.’

The bishop understood what it meant for Jesus to have given us ‘grace in place of grace already given.’

Thirdly and finally, let’s go to Mount Sinai with Moses.

17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

Ah, the law: that’s what we associate Moses with, isn’t it? Coming down from Mount Sinai with God’s prescription of two tablets, and then all those other laws, some of which perplex us today.

So it was law in the Old Testament and grace in the New Testament after all? Except you have to remember when it was that God gave the law to Israel. It was after he had delivered them from Egypt in the Exodus and they were on their way to the Promised Land. So it’s not true that keeping God’s law was the way to salvation, it was rather how they responded to salvation.

Even so, there was a problem. Israel failed to keep the law. Prophet after prophet called them to repentance, but either they rejected the message or it didn’t stick.

Hence, the coming of Jesus with grace and truth. For grace is not just about forgiveness. It is about that on-going salvation from sin that the bishop told the earnest young Christian about.

And he does not only bring the truth, he is the truth. Jesus the truth lives among us and eventually within us by his Spirit. The truth of God is no longer laws external to us on tablets of stone. Now that truth lives within us and enables us to be different. This is the promise of Christmas. Not only God with us, not only God saving us from our sins, but God within us.

An old lady once collared me after a service and told me that what this country needed to do was simply to get back to the Ten Commandments, and then all would be well. But she missed the grace that Jesus offers here. Because on our own we fail to keep the Ten Commandments, or indeed any of God’s law. We need the grace of forgiveness, and the grace of God’s presence in our lives to transform us. If faith was just a rule-keeping exercise, Jesus would never have needed to come.

But he did come. He came to be present with us, even when we wander in a wilderness, and he calls us to do the same in the midst of others. He came to bring the greatest exodus of all, in the many ways he liberates us and this world from sin. He came to bring the inner strength we need if we are to respond to God’s love for us by being with us and within us.

If anyone has reason for joy and celebration this Christmas, it’s the disciple of Jesus. Don’t be miserable in the face of inappropriate celebrations in the world at Christmastime. Instead, show that we have greater reasons to throw a party than anybody else.

I know there are lots of things that affect our mood and our ability to celebrate at Christmas. We may have had a good or a bad year. There may be an empty seat at the table this year, or there may be new life in our family.

But in terms of our faith, the coming of Jesus gives us true strength. Christmas really is ‘good tidings of great joy.’

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Video and Text Of Sermon: Third Sunday Of Advent, Hope-Filled Anticipation

Here’s the video of this week’s act of worship, followed by the text of the sermon.

Matthew 11:2-11

From time to time, I have told you little episodes from the bigger story of how God led me to an Anglican theological college in Bristol when I was exploring what my sense of calling was.

A significant part of that story concerns the fact that in those days we were still in the time of educational grants for further education. My Local Education Authority turned me down for a grant.

I lodged an appeal against that decision. The college gave me a deadline to guarantee to them that I had the funds for my first year.

Forty-eight hours before their deadline expired, I learned that I had lost my appeal.

Forty-eight hours to go, and no money. Of course, I had been saving every month, but on its own it was nothing like enough for tuition and accommodation.

You can imagine that in that situation I started to wonder whether I was called to college after all. I had a collection of all sorts of notes of Bible verses, things trusted friends had said to me, and passages from books that had jumped out at me, which collectively pointed the same way.

But now it was all collapsing. Like I said, forty-eight hours to go and no money.

I’m sure you can see some similarities with the story of John the Baptist here.

He has been so sure of his calling. He has preached his heart out, without fear or favour. He has heralded his cousin Jesus as the Messiah.

But no longer. He’s in prison. Soon he will be executed. And so our reading begins,

2 When John, who was in prison, heard about the deeds of the Messiah, he sent his disciples 3 to ask him, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?’

Note how two things here conspire to lead to John’s sense of doubt. One is that he’s in prison. The other is that he asks these questions ‘When … he heard about the deeds of the Messiah’. It’s as if what he hears Jesus is up to doesn’t fit with his ideas of the Messiah’s job description.

You wouldn’t think that someone with John the Baptist’s calling would be so full of doubts, but he is. The negative circumstances push in on him and create doubt.

Does that in any way sound familiar? Are there bad events in your life that have had an effect on your faith? The loss of a job which had seemed so right for you. An early bereavement. A child going off the rails. A significant injustice. A beloved church leader falling into serious sin. A great dream for your life manifestly not coming to fruition.

If you are struggling in some way like that this Advent, then consider with me what Jesus offers in this passage in response to John the Baptist’s dark night of the soul.

Two things. Firstly, focus on Jesus.

How does Jesus respond to John’s disciples when they come to him with their leader’s questions?

4 Jesus replied, ‘Go back and report to John what you hear and see: 5 the blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor. 6 Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me.’

Look at what I’m doing, says Jesus. I’m fulfilling prophecy. This is straight from Isaiah 35, which is the Old Testament Lectionary reading paired with this Gospel reading.

Listen to Isaiah:

5 Then will the eyes of the blind be opened
    and the ears of the deaf unstopped.
6 Then will the lame leap like a deer,
    and the mute tongue shout for joy.

It corresponds closely with what Jesus describes himself doing here, and other parts of what Jesus says here show him fulfilling parts of Isaiah 61.

And if you started singing ‘O for a thousand tongues’ when I read those words from Isaiah 35, then bonus points for you, because these were part of Charles Wesley’s inspiration for that hymn.

Now these were probably not the verses John the Baptist had in mind for his cousin Jesus. He had described his cousin in quite fierce terms at times, and he might have wanted to go just before the healing of the blind, the deaf, the lame, and the mute in Isaiah 35:5-6 to the preceding two verses where the hearers are told not to worry, because their God will come with vengeance.

And John might have expected Jesus to go beyond the part of Isaiah 61 about proclaiming the good news to the poor to subsequent verses that talk about the day of vengeance of our God.

But as we know, Jesus postpones the talk of vengeance to the Last Judgment. It is there in his teaching, but he is clear that his incarnation, which we celebrate at Christmas, is about coming with the offer of salvation.

I don’t know, but maybe John could have done with a bit of vengeance as he sat in the dungeon of Herod Antipas. Perhaps it was easy to lapse into that way of thinking given the popular expectation of a military Messiah.

But sometimes what helps us when we are in our metaphorical dungeon is to be able to see a different part of Jesus’ character or ministry. Essentially, that’s what Jesus does here. Roughly speaking, he says to the disciples of John, look at the evidence and see that I’ve come to bring the promised salvation. That’s what my advent is about.

There is always more to Jesus than we have fully appreciated. The part of Jesus’ ministry to which he refers the disciples of John may not be what helps when we are in darkness because a loved one has not been healed. At those times it may be the way Jesus embraced human suffering himself that brings light to our darkness. Or the wonder of the Resurrection may be what brings us hope when we walk in the valley of the shadow of death.

More Jesus is always a good thing. We might want to read the Gospels more fully. We might find that a trusted Christian friend leads us to the aspect of Jesus that we need to lift us during our troubles.

The late Dr W E Sangster, the famous minister at Westminster Central Hall, once wrote that the Gospel is like a many-faceted diamond. We need to find the facet that shines the Good News into our particular situation.

We could adapt that very slightly and say that Jesus too is a many-faceted diamond, and that we simply need to find the facet of his Person and Work that shines his light into our situation.

Secondly, focus on Jesus’ estimation of you.

7 As John’s disciples were leaving, Jesus began to speak to the crowd about John: ‘What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed swayed by the wind? 8 If not, what did you go out to see? A man dressed in fine clothes? No, those who wear fine clothes are in kings’ palaces. 9 Then what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. 10 This is the one about whom it is written:

‘“I will send my messenger ahead of you,
    who will prepare your way before you.”

11 Truly I tell you, among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet whoever is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.

Undoubtedly in Jesus’ eyes, John the Baptist was the one prophesied by Malachi to be like Elijah come again as the forerunner to the Messiah, or the messenger in Isaiah who prepares the way. In other words, he was someone who had a profoundly important rôle in God’s plans.

Yet matched with that greatness was the humility of his standing, where even the least in the kingdom of God was greater. John was familiar with the humility needed, for as he had said of Jesus, ‘He must increase, but I must decrease.’

In other words, John was exactly who he thought he was before his crisis of faith. His call remains. God’s estimation of him remains.

How might this apply to us? I don’t know the calling of every individual who watches this video. I can’t even tell who watches it, only the overall numbers who do so.

But what I can say about all of you is that what hasn’t changed even when you had a crisis of faith, even when you doubted the very goodness of God, is that you remain beloved of him. You are still made in his image, carrying special dignity and responsibility for him in the world. You are still one for whom Jesus Christ came, lived, died, and rose again, that the barrier of sin between you and God might be removed and you be usefully employed in the service of his kingdom. You remain one whom your God will never forsake.

Your circumstances may make you question God’s love and God’s purposes for you. But remember that even Jesus expressed a sense of God-forsakenness on the Cross, and what could be darker than that? Yet his Faither brought him through that, using the Cross for good, and vindicating him in the Resurrection. Wait through your night for the dawn that God will bring.

The Christian writer Ann Voskamp says,

Christ-followers do more than believe some things are true, they trust that SomeOne is here.

She goes on to say,

This is a heart-broken planet, but this is not a forsaken planet. …

What electrifies all the dark is that Emmanuel is with us, and the current of His love holds the power to transform the darkest parts of our story into light.

His Withness heals all this brokenness.

May that be our hope this Advent and Christmas.

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