This week we have been remembering and celebrating VE Day. In the Spring and Summer months of 1945 countless men and women were coming home from the war to be reunited with their families. I wonder if amongst all those children, excited at the prospect of seeing their fathers for the first time in 3,4,5 years, there were any who, when the moment came, didn’t recognise their father, and went to hide behind their mother’s skirts, deeply wary of the man coming towards them. I wonder how long it took them to reconcile the memory they had of their father with the reality of the much changed man who had arrived home. It can be deeply painful in relationships when expectations and reality don’t match up. There has to be a recalibration, and sometimes that can take a while.
It seems to me that this is the kind of thing that we might be seeing at work in our reading from John’s eye witness account of the life and ministry of Jesus.
The Jews living in Jerusalem had heard Jesus teaching, they had seen some of the things he had been doing, but they were not all convinced that he was the Christ, the Messiah, God’s chosen one, sent to rescue the people of God from oppression and sin. They had a picture in their head of what the Messiah would look like, based on their reading of the prophets, and on their own history.
The reference at the beginning of our reading to the “Feast of Dedication” is important here. You may be more familiar with it as the celebration of Hanukkah.
In 167BC something dreadful had happened in Jerusalem. At the time Judea was part of the empire of the King of Syria, Antiochus IV Epiphanes. As part of a crackdown on an unruly province Antiochus had banned the Jewish faith and had desecrated the Temple by ordering the setting up a statue of Zeus and the sacrificing of pigs on the altar of the temple.
This had led to further unrest and a successful revolt against Syrian rule led by Judah Maccabee and his sons. Maccabee was actually the nickname he earned – “The Hammer”. The festival of Hanukkah, the Feast of Dedication, marked the successful conclusion of that revolt and the rededication of the Temple following the desecration. It was a victory celebration, not unlike VE Day.
However, there was a further poignancy in it for the Jews of Jesus’ time, because the freedom from overseas rule that the Maccabees had won for the Jewish people hadn’t lasted very long. By the time of this conversation in the Temple courts the nation was under foreign rule again, this time that of the Romans.
So, just imagine it. The Jewish people are celebrating the success of one revolt against a foreign emperor and at the same time waiting and longing for someone else, a modern day Maccabee, a new Hammer, to come and strike away the oppression of the Romans. All this recent history would have been shaping the expectation that the Jewish people had of the Messiah, and is behind that question that they asked Jesus:
“How long will you leave us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly”
Jesus’ response is stark:
“I told you, and you do not believe.”
As evidence for this claim, Jesus points towards the works that he has done. The people he’s talking to know that he has healed blind people, cleansed lepers, walked on water, feed thousands of people with a few loaves and fishes. Some of this they’ve seen for themselves, and some they’ve heard reported by first hand witnesses. Jesus has demonstrated his power and authority over nature, over illness, and over evil spirits. The signs are all there, there is plenty of evidence, but it’s not the kind of evidence that the people are expecting, or want to see.
As Jesus goes on to explain, they are not Jesus’ followers, they are not part of his flock, so they don’t recognise his voice.
As the proverb has it, “there are none so blind as those who will not see”
For these people it’s not lack of evidence that leads to lack of belief, but lack of willingness to believe that leads to not taking account of the evidence. It’s not lack of evidence that leads to lack of belief, but lack of willingness to believe that leads to not taking account of the evidence.
Jesus doesn’t fit their expectations, their mental picture of a Messiah, and so they are unable to see the evidence that Jesus is the Messiah, because he’s not the kind of Messiah they were looking for. The only hammer in Jesus story will be the one battering the nails into his wrists and ankles.
Then Jesus makes a very provocative statement:
“I and the Father are one”
This outrageous claim challenged even more deeply the understanding that the Jewish people had of the Messiah. All the key historical figures of their faith were human. Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Miriam, Samson, Deborah, Samuel, Hannah, David, Isaiah, Elijah, Esther, Nehemiah, Judah Maccabee were all human, they made no claim to be divine, to be equal with God, to be God. So, the Jewish people were not expecting the Messiah, God’s chosen one, to be anything more than human. In fact, claiming to be equal with God, to be one with God was deeply offensive, it was blasphemous.
If we had read on, we would have discovered that the people listening to Jesus were so upset, so offended by this claim that they picked up stones, ready to stone him, to kill him, because they were so angry with him. Their own convictions about what the Messiah ought to look like stopped them believing in the Messiah when he was right in front of them.
In the face of this, Jesus calls attention once again to the evidence of his life and work, whilst insisting on his claim that he and the Father are one. In verse 39, right at the end of this encounter Jesus says,
“If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me; but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.”
As we listen in to this conversation, and reflect on what’s going on in it, it seems to me that it might prompt some things for us to consider.
Firstly, there are some questions that we might want to explore about in our relationship with Jesus:
Who do we believe Jesus to be? Which of Jesus’ claims about himself do we find most difficult to accept? What do we understand about what it means for Jesus and the Father to be one? What expectations of God do we have that might be getting in the way of our relationship with Jesus? These aren’t always easy questions to answer, and in fact that answers will change as we go through life. We can ask the Holy Spirit to help us as we consider them, and as we work out what they mean for our lives.
Secondly, we might want to explore the importance of the consistency of our actions and our words.
Jesus could point to what he did as evidence of his relationship with Father God. We don’t have that same relationship, we don’t claim to be divine, but as followers of Jesus, people should be able to look at what we do and see evidence of God at work in our lives. It isn’t just about coming to church on Sunday, or saying that we believe in God, it’s about living in a way that demonstrates that. How can we bring signs of God’s life and love into the situations that we find ourselves in day to day?
We are still in Easter season so we continue to celebrate victory. Not just victory in Europe, but victory in every land, for all time, for every person. The victory of Jesus on the cross and by his resurrection. This is the greatest of all his signs, the clearest of all his works, showing once and for all that he is who he claimed to be. He is one with the Father, he is God, and he came as the Father’s chosen and anointed one to rescue the world. May we have the eyes to see him clearly, and the grace to share this good news with those around us, that they may join in the victory celebrations.
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