In our country’s history we’ve tended to value what’s been called “rugged individualism.” Each person should strive to work hard and take care of their own responsibilities. This has been a very helpful thing for our country. But this rugged individualism is misunderstood if we see community as a threat to it. Rugged individualism and communal thinking should go hand in hand and support each other. Consider a nuclear family. On the one hand, we could focus on an individual family member and what sorts of responsibilities they have. So, for example, a mom with small children may have various tasks she works to get done each day at the house. But on the other hand, we could focus on how the family members relate with one another and work together. Here we could look at that same mom and say that she also spends time with her children, teaches them to do various things by letting them help her, and perhaps has a job in the community to help provide for the family. In our lives we have our more individual and private aspects and we have our more communal aspects.
Such thoughts can help us understand our text from the Gospel of John better. In our text we have an important discussion of Jesus amidst the festival of Hanukkah. I’ve mentioned to you numerous times that I believe that holy week in John largely has Hanukkah as its context. Holy week focuses especially on the work of Jesus in distinction from the other two divine persons, the Father and the Spirit. But our text this morning is from the time shortly before holy week. Here there seems to be more of an emphasis on community and the Father, Son, and Spirit working together. For example, in John 6 through John 12 there is a clear movement from Passover at the beginning of the Jewish year to the Feast of Tabernacles at the middle of the Jewish year to Hanukkah at the end of the year. These feasts come in rapid succession so that we are encouraged to compare them to one another. Certain themes from one feast also have echoes in the other feasts. This ultimately points to the Father, Son, and Spirit working together amidst the feasts. There is a family feel to the feasts and there is a family feel to the Father, Son, and Spirit who are working with God’s people through the feasts. Here the fellowship of the Father, Son, and Spirit opens up so that we can share in it as well through the power of the Spirit. We’ll entitle the sermon this morning The Unity of God’s Family.
In previous sermons on our text I’ve emphasized how Jesus relates to Feast of Hanukkah in our text, and I won’t spend too much time rehashing that with you now. Simply put, in the Jewish calendar, Passover celebrated the beginning of the nation of Israel with the exodus out of Egypt, Tabernacles celebrated the daily journey of Israel in this world, and Hanukkah celebrated the final destination of Israel. Concerning Hanukkah, the destination of Israel was the promised land, which was centered in Jerusalem and the Jerusalem temple. Consider a first portion of our text:
At that time the Feast of Dedication [or Hanukkah] took place at Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the colonnade of Solomon.
Here Hanukkah and the temple are closely associated with each other, and Jesus seems poised to fulfill them both. As the text continues, we further see a connection with Hanukkah. Here Jesus is being persecuted. This recalls the events of Hanukkah. For in the second century BC Israel was persecuted both by the pagan general Antiochus Epiphanes as well as by certain people within Israel who treacherously sided with the invaders. The height of this persecution was the desecration of the temple. Returning to our text, Jesus is now the new Israel and the new temple who is being persecuted. The final part of our text especially struck me as I prepared this sermon. Here Jesus says,
My Father, who has given [my sheep] to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.
What do these verses have to do with what Jesus has been talking about? What do they have to do with Hanukkah and with the idea of Jesus being persecuted like the Israelites of old? I believe the answer to this question can be found in our discussion from earlier in the sermon. The great feasts in Jewish calendar were connected to one another. Passover celebrated the beginning of the Jewish nation, but Passover would not be completely fulfilled until Israel came into the promised land and worshiped at the temple, events that Hanukkah celebrates. Similarly, Israel never would have been able to worship at the temple and celebrate Hanukkah if it had not first been freed from slavery in connection with Passover. To put it simply, Passover is incomplete without Hanukkah to finish it, and Hanukkah has no foundation without Passover. And ultimately these things point us to the greater reality of the Trinity. Our heavenly Father created this world and showed his faithfulness to the world through freeing the Israelites from bondage in Egypt. But these things remained incomplete until the appearing of the Son. Jesus as the new temple and the new promised land had to be persecuted and attacked by our sins in order to pay for them and through his resurrection give us eternal life. What was begun by the Father had to be completed by the Son, and what the Son completed never would have been possible if it weren’t for the beginning brought about by the Father. I believe this is what Jesus means when he says, “I and the Father are one.” It points to the fact that the Father and Jesus are working together for our salvation. Their work has to be a unity, each of their vocations requires the other. In this way there was Unity in God’s Family
How then might these things be helpful for our lives today? At the beginning of the sermon I mentioned how a family requires not just the rugged individualism of each member, a family also requires the family members to live and work together. This is what helps bring unity to our families. And part of our living and working together is that we each have unique gifts and abilities. When Jesus said “I and the Father are one,” part of what he was saying was that he and the Father were each doing unique things. So too as we work together should we each do the unique things we are best equipped with and have developed. For example, consider a mother and a young child in a family. Here a mother functions as more of a beginning relative to her child. She is older than her child and is the one who helped give the child its beginning and early nurturing. The child on the other hand will reach his or her maturity in the future. Much of the work here will be in the future. This is kind of like the Father and the Son in our text. Just as the Father is associated with creation and the Son associated with bring creation to completion, so can a mother be associated with providing a beginning for a child and the child can help bring the mother’s desires to fulfillment in the future. If the mother and her child both recognize these things, they can work in the present accordingly. The mother can train her child in an age appropriate way, knowing that he or she is just beginning the journey. And the child can aim for patience in the learning process, knowing that much of the work will come in the future.
So too should we here try to use our unique gifts as we work together. In light of our text this morning alluding to Jesus’ cross through the temple imagery, we must confess that we are not Jesus. Jesus paid for our sins, we couldn’t pay for them. Nevertheless, we can, as Matthew’s Gospel, puts it in a similar place, forgive one another. Knowing that we are sinners capable of evil, we can rest in Christ’s forgiveness and work to forgive each other. Since Christ has paid the enormous debt of our sin, we should strive to forgive our much smaller debts against one another. And each of us will have different strengths in connection with our forgiving one another as we work together for the world. Some of us may have a lot of patience so that we are good at forgiving others moment by moment in our lives. Others of us may have less patience, but are better at relating to others in bigger sins. This sort of person may be able to bring great healing and forgiveness in an especially tense situation. There are no doubt many variations of our gifts here. But the point is that we’re each unique, and we forgive in unique ways. And we should try to help each other discover our gifts so that we may all best use them for the work of God’s kingdom.
And so that’s my challenge to you today. As you work to maximize your strengths and develop skills in your life, think about how you respond to when someone sins against you. Think about the smaller sins that may be committed against you. Think about the larger sins. Think about how it depends on what person commits the sin. And then think about how you respond in these various situations. Do you respond well in some cases but not others? Could you think these things through better than you have in the past? Are you willing to make small steps to get better at forgiving other? Are you willing to experiment a little bit with the process in order to do so?
These are some takeaways from our text this morning. Jesus was preparing to fulfill Hanukkah by being the temple that was desecrated due to our sin so that he might cleanse our sin and build us into the new temple of his body, the church. We already see Jesus’ patience in our text as he continues talking with people who have already sinned grievously against him and were obviously planning on sinning more against him in the near future. Are we willing to try to follow Jesus’ example here in some small way. In the chapters after our text we see Lazarus as a prototypical disciple. What happens to him? He dies, right? But then Jesus raises him from the dead and empowers him to witness to Jesus. So too must we strive with the help of the Holy Spirit to put to death our grudges and our desires for revenge against those who have wronged us. As we do so, the Holy Spirit will give us new life for living out God’s mission to the world here. He’ll help us to live in the hope of Christ’s forgiveness and eternal life. And he’ll help us to work at getting better at forgiving others so that as many people as people might know Jesus and the eternal life he offers. Living as Christ’s disciples we’ll not only know the unity that we receive by being baptized into God’s one family and the unity of being forgiven by Christ, we’ll also know in a smaller way the unity that comes from forgiving each other and working together to get better at forgiving others. And so this morning we’ve considered Unity in God’s Family.
