Tag: Ten Commandments

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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Sermon: Moses And The Feeding Of The Five Thousand

John 6:1-21

When I trained for the ministry in Manchester, we went out on preaching appointments all over the north west – everywhere from Liverpool to Newcastle under Lyme. If we were in a circuit morning and evening, we had lunch and tea with members of that circuit. I remember the Liverpool couple who were proud they lived just across from the estate where Brookside was filmed – unfortunately, I’ve always been allergic to soaps. I recall the farming couple in Chester who tried to marry me off to their daughter. I remember visiting a former superintendent of mine from home who was then in Newcastle under Lyme.

Less happy are my memories of a trip to a Methodist church in Swinton, Greater Manchester. Apart from my college principal turning up unannounced to assess my service, I got a frosty welcome in the vestry. The stewards had telephoned for the hymns during the week, and when I walked into the vestry they demanded I change two of them. “We don’t know this one and we don’t like that one.” I refused. I told them they could learn the unfamiliar one, and they could put up with the hymn they didn’t like, because it fitted my theme.

What was the hymn they disliked? ‘Moses, I know you’re the man’ (this link is a PowerPoint download). And I mention that this morning, because this famous story about the feeding of the five thousand – the only story to appear in all four Gospels apart from the death and resurrection of Jesus – is full of Moses references. Let me show you what I mean – and how that is relevant to us – not by taking things in the order they appear in this story, but by taking the ‘Moses’ elements of this account and placing them in the order they originally happened in Israel’s history.

Firstly, there is the element of Passover. According to John, this incident happened when ‘the Passover … was near’ (verse 4). You’ll remember that the Passover commemorated the deliverance of God’s people when God judged Egypt for enslaving them. It is a festival of freedom and justice.

And in Jesus’ day, many of God’s people felt the need for something similar. They may have been back in their own land, but they were occupied by the Romans. Even in this reading, the Sea of Galilee is also referred to by its alternative Roman name, the Sea of Tiberias (verse 1). The Jewish people once again needed deliverance. It’s telling that after this miraculous sign, they wanted to take Jesus by force and make him king (verse 15).

But as we know with hindsight and with faith, the deliverance brought by Jesus was a different kind of freedom. Not that he was or is indifferent to the plight of those who are under the cosh of a powerful enemy, but he knew that everyone also needs a far deeper liberation, not just the freedom from the sins of others but freedom from their own sins.

And that is where Christians celebrate a festival meal of freedom and justice. We call it Holy Communion, where we proclaim that Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us. Yet the moment you try to make that connection with John’s Gospel, you have trouble. John is the only Evangelist not to record the institution of the Lord’s Supper. The nearest he has is the feeding of the five thousand, followed by the conversation later in John 6 where Jesus describes himself as ‘the bread of life’. You also see in this story Jesus not simply saying grace before the bread and fish are distributed, but giving thanks, in language similar to that which he used at the Last Supper. It is no wonder that the nineteenth century Christian F D Maurice, when asked whether this passage was about the Lord’s Supper, said no, but that equally, there was no better place in the Scriptures to learn about Holy Communion than here.

I have always had a problem with the way we give such small amounts of bread and wine to worshippers at Holy Communion. But perhaps God intends us to expect a feeding miracle at the sacrament. As we receive small morsels of bread and take tiny sips of wine, God multiplies them in our hearts, as he makes himself real to us by his grace through our faith.

So we might wonder, especially in a well-fed western society what the feeding of the five thousand means for us, but we can immediately see one application. It helps us come to the Lord’s table with expectant faith that he will work in us.

Secondly, we have the Mountain. The disciples go up a mountain with Jesus (verse 3) after he has healed many sick people (verse 2), just as Moses went up the mountain to be with God, after God delivered the children of Israel from Egypt. Moses receives the Ten Commandments.

Now before we note what the Jesus equivalent here to the Moses parallel might be, we do well for a moment to think about the Ten Commandments. Sometimes we think these are rules for a healthy society, and everyone should follow them. Well – yes, they reflect God’s standards. But we are mistaken if we think we can commend them to others or command others to follow them and all will be well. As a young Local Preacher, I remember an elderly lady saying to me after a service, “If we could just get our country to follow the Ten Commandments again, everything would be all right.”

But it’s important to remember something about the timing of the Ten Commandments. God gave them to Israel after he delivered them from Egypt. In other words, keeping the Ten Commandments was never going to earn salvation for Israel. Rather, keeping the Ten Commandments was a grateful response to God’s faithful covenant love in delivering them. They were to keep the commandments as a sign of gratitude.

Now when Jesus invites the disciples up the mountain in this story and he is then joined by the large crowd (verse 5), what is the Son of God looking for? He looks for a response to his saving acts. The crowd know he has been healing people and the disciples know he has been performing wonders such as turning water into wine (2:1ff) and has been referring to himself as ‘the living water’ (4:10), relying on food from his Father (4:33). In other words, they know some amazing acts and statements of deliverance from him. Do you not think that he too looks for some grateful obedient faith?

And just as Moses didn’t get a great response from the Israelites – you’ll recall that a golden calf was involved – neither does Jesus. When he tests the disciples with the question of what to do about the problem (verses 5-6), Philip responds that six months’ wages would not be enough to feed everyone (verse 7).

Andrew does a little better, though.  Just as in an earlier chapter he brought his brother Simon Peter to Jesus, now he brings a small boy. ‘There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?’ (Verse 9) He doesn’t sound full of hope. Just a boy in a grown-up world. Just five loaves – and barley loaves at that, the food of the poor. Not only that, but the two fish are not fresh fish but dried or pickled fish – again, elements of a poor family’s diet. There’s not much, and it’s not of great quality.

Yet that is what Jesus uses. It may not be much and it may not be good, but he performs the miraculous sign with it. Just as Andrew’s faith was not much. Just as our faith may not be much.

What is God looking for? He is searching for grateful obedient faith in response to all he has done for us in Christ. We may not think we have anything much to give, but the challenge then is not to reject God like the Israelites, nor to be faithless like Philip, but to offer even the meagre faith of an Andrew. Even a response like that is enough. It puts us in God’s hands, at God’s disposal. That’s what we need to do.

Thirdly and finally, this all happens in a withdrawn place (verse 3 cf. verse 15). There may have been ‘a great deal of grass’ on which to sit down (verse 10), but it was clearly remote. It was the equivalent of the Wilderness. This story is about food being provided in a wilderness. So not only does it resonate with the Passover, it also makes connections with the provision of the manna.

You’ll remember that when God supplied the manna to the children of Israel in the wilderness, he did so after a bout of complaining. They were missing the home comforts of Egypt – a rich claim from a group of people who had been forced to make bricks without straw, but they were fed up with the plainness and simplicity of their desert life. They hardly had the best of motives. Yet God provided for them.

And here, you could say that the crowd didn’t entirely have the best of motives. I’m sure there was a certain amount of genuine human need mixed in as they followed the Healer to his mountain hideaway, but there was a clear element of going for what was in it for them – hence they label Jesus as the prophet they had expected (verse 14) and try to make him king by force (verse 15) to serve their purposes.

Yet just as in the wilderness where God provided for an unworthy bunch, so he did the same in Christ here. That may be revolutionary to us in a society where our welfare state is based on the idea of the ‘deserving poor’, but grace doesn’t simply give to the deserving. It wouldn’t be grace then. God in grace gives blessings to the undeserving.

Before I studied Theology and then trained for the ministry, I was a civil servant, working in what was then known as the Department of Health and Social Security (or the Department of Stealth and Total Obscurity, as some frustrated wags called it). I remember being on a Christian holiday one year, where a rather Hyacinth Bucket type woman asked me what my work was. Replying that I worked for the DHSS, she said, “Well at least you are on the right side of the counter.” That’s the kind of attitude that doesn’t understand grace.

No – the grace of a God who blesses the undeserving in the wilderness looks very different. It may be something apparently trivial, like the story of Steve Chalke who first went to church because that was where the pretty girls were, only to find himself bowled over by Jesus Christ. It may be someone who tries to strike a bargain with God – “If you do this for me, I will follow you.” It may be somebody in desperate straits that are partly or completely their own fault. In a book I recently read, Neil Cole said that you can ask the non-Christians in a street who most needs the Gospel, and they will usually be right. They will point you to the person in the most terrible situation. You can visit that person, and often they will be open to the Gospel. It may even be a heinous sinner who has become a social outcast, the modern equivalent of a Zaccheus. Whoever it is, the gracious God who in Christ blessed undeserving people in the wilderness wants to do the same today, through his Son who went to the wilderness of the Cross on our behalf. It is our privilege to be his ambassadors, introducing this reckless and extravagant love to a suspicious world.

And that means we too shall need to learn the habits of recklessness and extravagance if we are to model that grace. May God lead us willingly to the undeserving. For we were – and still are – ourselves among their ranks.

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