“Now before the Feast of the Passover, Jesus knowing that His hour had come that He would depart out of this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end."
Jesus knew that His hour had come. This should not come as a startling revelation to anyone who has read the first four books of the New Testament. Jesus always knew what time it was.
THE HOUR HAD COME
It should just be what we call a ‘given’, that the wisdom that fills the infallible, inerrant, immutable Word of God would be demonstrated unfailingly in God’s perfect Son – the Word, become flesh.
So when we remember that the son of King David wrote in Ecclesiates that there is a time for everything and a time appointed for every event under heaven, it should be no stretch for us that God incarnate would be perfectly in tune with that divine timetable and that He would be Divinely aware from day to day, hour to hour, whether it was time for one thing and whether it was not yet time for another.
And this understanding is demonstrated in the Gospel record of the life of Jesus.
Although there was not a mention of time itself there, in the 2nd chapter of Luke’s gospel which is the only boyhood event of Jesus’ life recorded for us, we find that after the journey to Jerusalem for the Passover Jesus stays behind and his parents only discover after a day’s journey toward home that He is not with them.
When they find Him after much frantic and anxiety-filled searching, Jesus asks them why they sought Him everywhere, and wonders that they did not know He had to be about His Father’s business.
So in this early glimpse of Jesus, and even as a 12 year old boy, we have confirmed to us that He was aware of the time. He had come to the world to do His Father’s will, and the time to do the Father’s will was always. Therefore He was able to say as an adult in John 8:29, “I always do the things that are pleasing to Him”.
But He also had the awareness of a more specific calandar; a schedule, if you will, of the Divinely appointed task He was to accomplish during His sojourn here.
At the wedding in Cana (Jn 2:4) when His mother told Him that the family had run out of wine for the celebration, the response Jesus gave her was “Woman, what do I have to do with you? My hour has not yet come”.
Don’t you just wonder if Mary walked away thinking, “Gee… all I said was they ran out of wine…”
Anyway, what Jesus meant by the reference to His hour not having yet come, was that there was a time set for Him to go public with His ministry and the fulfillment of the things the prophets had said about Him, and that hour had not come.
When did it come? After His baptism by John in the Jordan. After His subsequent 40 days and nights in the wilderness and His return out of the wilderness. That’s when this ‘hour’ began that He spoke to His mother about at Cana.
Yet, out of compassion, He in His sovereignty as God superceded the entire process of fermentation and aging and all that goes into the making of a good wine, and provided the party with the best wine of all.
“I will have compassion upon whom I will, and mercy upon whom I will”.
In His discourse with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well (Jn 4:21,23) Jesus demonstrated His knowledge of the future in telling her that the hour was coming when true worshipers would worship in spirit and in truth as opposed to any physical locations set aside for that purpose. In other words, He was teaching that true worship was not physical and geographical, but spiritual and from the heart.
Someone somwhere has pointed out that no true worship ever happens on earth. What he meant by that is that true worship is in spirit and it is between the spirit of man and the Spirit of Christ. Some of the things we do in the flesh are demonstrations of worship – we are even commanded to do them – such as the taking of communion and the act of going down into the waters of baptism. But even those things are empty and hypocritical if they do not issue from worship that is in spirit and in truth.
Let me just toss in here for your later contemplations, that most of the stuff we do, thinking we’re worshiping, is self-serving emotional nonsense. We should pause often to reevaluate the things we have allowed to be absorbed and implemented in the culture of the organization we call church.
There are other references made by John, in chapter 5 and chapters 7 and 8 to the fact that Jesus was impervious to the wicked plans of those who wanted to do Him harm because His hour had not yet come. The Phairsees wanted for a long time to lay hold of Jesus and destroy Him to get Him out of their way; out of their hair. But God the Father had a plan, and Jesus was perfectly carrying out that plan, and He was going to accomplish that plan in the Father’s time, not according to the whim of any man.
Finally, in John 12, Jesus plainly tells His disciples, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” and in verse 27 of that chapter He says, “Now, My soul has become troubled; and what shall I say, ‘Father, save Me from this hour’? But for this purpose I came to this hour. Father, glorify Thy name.”
Now let’s just stop here for a moment and try to absorb this.
Our text is worded this way: “Now before the Feast of the Passover, Jesus knowing that His hour had come that He should depart out of this world to the Father…”
Once more there is this demonstration put before us of the Divine wisdom and understanding of Jesus concerning the Father’s timetable. The hour had come. It was time.
Yet, where any one of us – any man or woman born of man and woman –
would be focusing with a great deal of trepdation on the physical suffering that surely lay before us, and where we would most certainly be saying, ‘my hour has come; my time has come, to be taken to the place of suffering where I will die’, John, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, gives us a glimpse into the mind of the sinless Son of God and shows us where His focus and His priorities were.
Knowing that His hour had come that He should depart out of this world to the Father…
Isn’t that amazing? Jesus, during His earthly ministry had occasion to talk about why He came into the world. “I came to do…” He would say. “The Son of Man has come…” He said.
Now He is going to depart.
When He was on the mount of transfiguration with Moses and Elijah, Luke tells us, He was discussing with them the departure He would accomplish in Jerusalem (Lk 9:31)
Why would this particular wording be employed for us? Well, let me preface this by assuring you that I would never say anything to diminish in any way the horrible suffering Jesus endured at the hands of evil men and in drinking dry the cup of the Father’s wrath against sin for all who are His.
But it was all something Jesus was accomplishing. It was in the plan. No one was taking His life from Him; He was laying it down willingly that He might take it up again, and He declared in John 10 that He had authority to do so. Jn 10:18
He said Himself that at His request the Father would send more than 72,000 angels to His rescue, but then the Scriptures would not be fulfilled. Matt 26:53-54
He said that His food was to do the Father’s will. He said He came to accomplish all that the Father had given Him to do. He was here to glorify the Father, and I don’t think it is presuming too much to say that in the mind of Jesus, a few hours of suffering was not to be compared with an eternity of glory. In fact, it’s not presuming anything, since the great Apostle Paul would later write ‘For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared to the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom 8:18).
Remember, Jesus knew where He was going. He had been there. He was going home. He was going home, and this was the only route.
‘Was it not necessary’, He asked on the road to Emmaus, ‘for the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory?’ Lk 24:26
Yes! It was necessary! We can’t go to Heaven if we don’t die, my friend. Nothing that has not died can ever be resurrected. And in the case of the eternal Son of God it was necessary that every thing that was determined in the Divine counsel be accomplished so that Scripture might be fulfilled; that all righteousness might be fulfilled. There was no backup plan!
The hour had come that He should depart out of this world to the Father.
And I just can’t help believing that there was a part of Him breathing a sigh of relief that it was finally time.
Well, the next two words we find in our text are:
HAVING LOVED
- His own the Jews
Speaking in general terms, Jesus has loved His own people in the flesh. I’m speaking of the nation of the children of Israel; the Jews, from whom Jesus descended according to the flesh.
“He came to His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him” Jn 1:11
When John wrote that in the opening statements of his Gospel, he was referring primarily to the leaders; those who represented the nation. That is always the way news is generally understood. Those who are powerful and prominent have the loudest voice.
The initial reports of response to anything coming out of a nation or a people will be colored by the response and reaction of the leadership. Only further study and inspection will reveal the details as to how the general public reacted and what the percentages were and so forth.
The reality was that during the first couple of years of the public ministry of Jesus, He was very popular with the common Israelite. In fact, He was most popular and best received by those the nation’s leaders would have looked down upon as the dregs of society. The tax-gatherers and irreligious people loved Jesus. He met them where they were. He told them about the kingdom of Heaven and He made them realize Heaven was available by faith, and neither worldly wealth nor worldly clout had anything to do with it – that those purely human and physical circumstances could neither get them to Heaven nor keep them out.
He healed the sick and raised the dead. He gave sight to the blind and mobility to the paralyzed. They heard Him openly criticize and contradict the elitest doctrines of the haughty Pharisees and Sadducees. He was very popular. It was the elite, it was those on the top of the heap that rejected Him almost from the moment He made His earliest public appearance.
Well, that is understandable since His first real ‘coming-out’ was when He fashioned a small whip out of cords laying about and used it to drive money-changers and merchants out of the Temple during the most profitable holy day of the year.
By the end though, Jesus was rejected by the entire nation.
When the people started realizing He wasn’t the new Judas Macabee; that He wasn’t going to rout Rome, break her grip on the commonwealth of Israel and take His seat on David’s throne, that was quite a disappointment to them.
So when everything came to a head and the Jews arrested Jesus in the dead of night and held their several kangaroo courts and bullied spineless Pilate into issuing His crucifixion orders, it was no difficult task to work the crowds into a lather of mob rule and get them shouting, “Crucify, crucify Him!” and “Let His blood be on our heads and on our childrens!”
He came to His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him.
- His own, the disciples
Getting more specific, there were those Jesus called His own in the sense that following a full night of prayer He chose twelve out of the many who had begun to follow Him around the countryside and called them His apostles.
They were to be the seedlings of His church and He certainly loved them, didn’t He? They were careful to record some of the ways Jesus demonstrated His love for them during the almost 4 years they lived and walked together.
In fact the very structure of this portion of John’s Gospel vividly demonstrates the love of Jesus for His chosen apostles. Chapters 13 – 16 of this Gospel are all about that very subject.
This verse we’re studying begins the departure from the previous narrative, saying that Jesus knew His hour had come to go home to the Father, and announcing that having loved His own He loved them to the uttermost, then the rest of these 4 chapters through to the end of chapter 16 are the written evidence to prove that statement.
What do we have right here in this chapter? Well, there is the sad news of verse 2 of course, of the heart-condition of Judas Iscariot. Then right away beginning with verse 3 there is the account of Jesus washing His disciples’ feet and their reaction; specifically, Peter’s reaction, and what Jesus taught them and us by it. That is for another sermon.
Let me take just a brief side trail here. Please notice that Jesus washed Judas’ feet also. He didn’t wait until Judas was gone, then rub His hands together, turn to the group and say, ‘Ok, now we can finally do church, now that the dead meat is out of the way’. Knowing who Judas was and what he was going to do, He washed his feet and demonstrated this love for him as well as for the others.. So when Jesus commands us to love our enemies and pray for our persecutors we’re hearing it from the true Master, aren’t we?
We’re hearing it from the One who loved His own who were in this world, perfectly. That’s what it means when John says ‘to the end’. It is not necessarily a comment on the quality of His love, although it would certainly be correct to say that the love of Jesus for those who are His is perfect; but the more immediate context would refer to the completeness of His love. Jesus loved them completely. To the uttermost.
Getting back on track; it’s in these chapters, 13-16, that Jesus promises them a place in Heaven. It is here that He promises whatever they ask in His name will be done for them. It is here that He promises to send the Comforter; the Holy Spirit.
By the way… in chapter 14 verse 16 when Jesus tells them, “And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever”, the wording there has the connotation of someone or something that is exactly like the previous one being referred to . Do you see it? “Another Helper”?
Jesus was telling them, ‘I’m leaving, but I’m sending Somone exactly like Me. I have been with you, but this One, this Helper who is exactly like Me will be in you.’
Jesus’ love for them and for us did not cease or cease to be demonstrated at the cross and the empty tomb, believer. He returned to the Father so that He could continue to manifest His love through this One Paul called “The Spirit of Christ”; the Holy Spirit who is not only with you, but in you. And remember that in chapter 14 verse 16 He said ‘forever’. He will be with you forever. That should give you and me the greatest of comforts and consolation, fellow Christ-follower. The Comforter, the Holy Spirit who was sent by Christ to quicken you and to live in you is with you forever. Not just until your body dies and you leave this world, but forever. In Heaven, in eternity, you will have the constant presence and power and Person of Christ intimately with you, non-stop, uninterrupted, forever.
Jesus said so!
Well, Jesus’ hour had come to return to the Father having loved His own, the Jews in the flesh, His own, the chosen 12, and…
- His own, chosen before the world was.
Now it might be argued that John was referring specifically to the Apostles when he penned the words of verse one of chapter 13 for his first century readers, since he immediately went into the foot-washing account and then all the things Jesus had to say privately to the eleven after Judas departed.
But those things didn’t stay private, did they? And we needn’t speculate ast to what precisely was going on in the mind of John as he wrote, because whatever John might have been thinking becomes moot if we only pause to consider that the Holy Spirit inspired his writing – every single word of it – and preserved it, and passed it down even to today – and by today I mean literally, this particular day where this particular Word is being preached, and when every Bible-believing Christian studies these words of John 13 through 16 and understands that all of it applies to us as well as to those in that first century private room.
Jesus did not literally wash our feet. We did not literally partake with Him of the Passover meal. But there is a spiritual application in both that applied to the Apostles and applies to us.
And when Jesus said that the Father would give them another Helper that He may be with them forever, and when He described that Helper as the Spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive, He was issuing a promise that has been fulfilled in every born again believer since the day the Holy Spirit came on the day of Pentecost.
And when Jesus said ‘You did not choose Me, but I chose you” we understand that while He was speaking in a closed room to eleven faithful men, He was also speaking of every born again believer from then until now and until the Lord calls His church home; Peter confirmed that:
“But you are A CHOSEN RACE, A royal PRIESTHOOD, A HOLY NATION, A PEOPLE FOR God’s OWN POSSESSION, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light;”
That’s not the only New Testament passage that gives us this doctrine but it is one of the most pointed.
People, we need to see the history of the church as a single event. That’s the way God sees it. Remember that with Him a thousand years is as a day and vice versa, meaning, time is a non-issue with God.
Do you know that in God’s economy the resurrection is a single event? Jesus’ resurrection and ours? That’s why Jesus is the firstfruits of the resurrection. That’s why we can have confidence that because He lives we too shall live.
As someone has said somewhere, the resurrection of Christ has all other resurrections contracted in it. Just because He rose in A.D. thirty something and the rest of us will rise millennia later that doesn’t change or mean a thing. To God it is all one resurrection. Why am I hammering on this?
Because when the Holy Spirit inspires the human author to write, ‘having loved His own who were in the world’, no matter what was on the mind of the human, on the mind of the Spirit was every one – EVERY ONE – of His who were/have been/are/will be in the world, and it says He ‘loved them/us perfectly, completely, to the uttermost, to the end.
Well, John wrote that ‘having loved,…He loved’. See it?
Having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end.
HE LOVED
Up to now my emphasis has been on whom Jesus loved. He loved His own. He loved His kinsmen according to the flesh, the nation of Israel. He loved His chosen 12 who would be His Apostles through whom He would build His church. He loved His chosen ones in all of the world’s history, and the most significant demonstration of that love was in the cruel abuse He suffered willingly, on the cross where He drank dry the cup of the Father’s wrath, and at the tomb where He burst forth in glorious, victorious Day for all who believe.
Now let’s talk briefly about the nature of His love, and this will be much shorter since much of it will be a reiteration of what’s already been said.
- In eternity
First of all, He loved in (or from) eternity.
Paul opened his letter to the Ephesians with a brief greeting, then broke immediately into an anthem of praise that contained these words:
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him.” Eph 1:3-4
We find like wording in Ephesians 2:10 and 2 Thessalonians 2:13. Jesus alluded to this fact Himself in the Parable of the Talents, when He went on to talk about the Judgment to come and said,
“Then the King will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you who are blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” Matt 25:34
And of course, the given implication is that He would have had no reason to prepare a kingdom for non-existent subjects; unless of course as God He planned and was able to bring those subjects into existence and preserve them for the kingdom He prepared.
So we see that before the world was we who are His were chosen to be His. More than that, we find that in love He determined before the world was that He would die for us.
We could go into quite a Bible drill here, flipping back and forth and looking at various passages; but let me keep it simple and just have you look at some well-known words of John the Baptist in John 1:29
“The next day he saw Jesus coming to him and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”
Now in the Jewish mind, what were lambs for? For sacrifice, right? More specifically, they were sacrificed and their blood applied to the altar and to the mercy seat in the Holy of Holies once each year, as a covering for sin. The people knew that sin was not taken away, or done away by these sacrifices. That’s why the sacrifices were constant and year after year the blood had to be sprinkled on the mercy seat in the Holy of Holies.
So John was making a very significant declaration to the nation of Israel, when he announced the arrival of the ‘Lamb of God’, who would ‘take away the sin of the world’!
Here is the implication for us. This had to be planned in advance. Before Jesus was born, before the Law was given, before Moses led their ancestors out of Egypt, before Abram was given the covenant of circumcision, before the Fall of Adam in the Garden of Eden, the Divine Trinity took counsel and determined that the Second Person of the Trinity would become flesh and shed His blood and die to take away the sin of the world. It was why He came. It was the plan. There was no backup plan!
- In Time
He loved us in eternity, and He loved us in time. That is, He entered into time as a Man and loved His own in time. We’ve spent most of our time today talking about this.
Just let me point out that the incarnation of Christ in itself was a demonstration of His love.
“For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.” Jn 3:17
“For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.” Lk 19:10
“If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world.” Jn 12:47
Just a small selection of examples.
I’m tempted to talk about the things He suffered just in the fact of being a human being – things that as God He never would have had to experience otherwise, but there isn’t time. Just ponder it in your own time. Think about hunger, hot days, sore feet, weariness at the end of a day, stupid questions from well-meaning students, insulting challenges of ill-intended enemies; just make your own list and remember that He willingly endured it all for your sake and to do the Father’s will. I must move on…
- Forever
He loved His own in eternity past and in the fact of His incarnation and all it entailed, and He loves His own forever. This is also something I’ve touched on today; let me remind you of what was said about the Holy Spirit of Christ being with you without interruption and without end. If you are a born again believer in Christ you will never, ever, ever, for a moment, for eternity, be apart from Him, be without Him, miss His presence, have to search for Him, have to call out as though He is afar off.
I detest the popular music and cultural philosophies of men that presume to declare God as ‘out there’; that He is ‘watching us from a distance’.
Balderdash! For the unregenerate He is out of reach. For those who are His He is closer than close. He was with us for a short while but now He is in us and His own word choice is ‘ahee-ohn’ ‘i-own’ evermore. Eternally. Forever. Speaking of an ‘unbroken age’. Without end.
I have to stop. But listen. Here is where I really wanted to get.
He loves ME!
And if you are one who has heard His call and responded in faith, and if you are one who has been given life from above and now have the indwelling Spirit of Christ teaching you and showing you His love forevermore, then you can join me in that sentiment and say, “He loves ME!”
During the time I was in Bible College a story came to me from the day classes. I was a 28 year old military veteran working full-time and attending the night classes there so I wasn’t in those bustling halls in the daytime with the daytime faculty scurrying about and the fresh-out-of-high school student body tagging after their favorite professors just hoping to absorb some wisdom and knowledge that might slough off of them onto the hall floor as they walked. But that is the mental picture I got as one of our instructors early in our first evening class shared this with us.
He said on that mid-morning between classes and near the school office one particularly diligent student stopped one of the most dignified and prestigious professors of the school, basically by standing in his path, and asked, “Dr., what is the most profound Biblical truth you have ever gleaned from the scriptures?”
“The most profound Biblical truth?” asked the teacher.
“Yes” said the student with his smile widening and a pen poised above his notebook. “What is the most profound doctrinal truth that has impacted your life?”
Our instructor stifled a laugh and said that without blink or pause, the Dr. answered, “Jesus loves me, this I know; for the Bible tells me so”
The student crestfallen, mumbled a barely discernable ‘thanks’ as he went on his way, probably wondering if his leg was being pulled or if the good Dr. was just wanting to move on to his class.
But do you know… That professor could not have preached a more powerful sermon had he stood in that hallway expounding until the next class was over.
Chapters 13 – 16 of John’s Gospel record for us the very charter of the love of Jesus for His own. It was His final uninterrupted evening with His chosen Apostles and He said to them everything they would have to know later, everything they would have to pass on to us, to assure our hearts forever that Jesus loves us, and that He has loved us perfectly – completely – to the uttermost – to…the end.
Jesus loves me! This I know,
For the Bible tells me so;
Little ones to Him belong;
They are weak, but He is strong.
Jesus loves me! He who died
Heaven’s gates to open wide!
He will wash away my sin,
Let His little child come in.
Yes, Jesus loves me, Yes, Jesus loves me,
Yes, Jesus loves me, The Bible tells me so.
-Anna B. Warner 1820-1915
