Introduction to the text:
I want to take some time to introduce our gospel reading before we read it. It’s a confusing text at best. It’s one of those things where if it makes sense to you while you’re hearing it you probably aren’t paying close enough attention! And if you’ve been in worship the last few weeks it’s also going to sound repetitive. You’ll find yourself thinking, “Didn’t Jesus already say that?”
In John’s gospel Jesus does repeat himself many times when he’s talking to the disciples at the last supper. Some biblical scholars suggest this may be a case where we have the same speech recorded from multiple points of view. They’re all included one right after another. There’s merit to this idea. There are many places in scripture where we get multiple points of view of the same event. They don’t always agree with one another. That always becomes challenging for those who want to say that we should just live by the “plain sense” of scripture. That’s a well-meaning idea, but with all the points of view and all the contradictions, finding what the “plain sense” is gets complicated! Let’s keep in mind for later though.
The approach we’re going to take with this text is the one most biblical scholars take. That is that it is just one point of view. What Jesus is doing is returning to the same few ideas over and over again, but each time pointing out an additional conclusion or meaning.
Still though, it’s easily confusing. It probably made more sense to the original readers as they knew its context, but it was still difficult to understand.
John’s gospel throws its readers a number of curves. Two of which we’re about to read. One thing John does is have people talking past each other; thinking they understand but not really. We’re about to read the disciples saying to Jesus, “Yes, now you are speaking plainly, not in any figure of speech! Now we know that you know all things, and do not need to have anyone question you; by this we believe that you came from God.” But we the readers know that they don’t really understand at all. Jesus says in reply, “Do you now believe? The hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each one to his home, and you will leave me alone.” No, the disciples don’t really understand at all!
The second thing John does that is confusing is that he uses the same words that we find elsewhere in the Bible but he defines them different. We’ll hear Jesus say, “And when [the Spirit] comes he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment.”
We think we know what words like sin and righteousness and judgment mean. I suppose we do, but not the way John uses them.
For John, sin is not a moral category. There is not a list of good things and bad things, with God standing about tracking our actions adding tick marks to a chalk board of our good and bad actions. For John, sin is a theological category. To sin is to not believe Jesus, or to not believe that Jesus is God’s ultimate revelation to the world. For John, any action done in faith is not a sin regardless of the outcome. And, any action not done in faith is always a sin. Again, regardless of whether the outcome is good or bad.
“Righteousness” also gets a different definition. When we think of righteousness we usually think of piety and living a prim and proper life; perhaps annoyingly so. People who are too righteous are no fun.
But again, that’s not how John uses righteousness. Righteousness in this passage means the rightness of God. What God does is right. And inasmuch as we have righteousness of our own, it is about being in relationship with God.
And finally, judgment. When we hear judgment in a church sense we think of someone being sent either to heaven or to hell. Not so in John’s gospel. In John’s gospel God has already judged the world. In verse 11 Jesus will say that God has condemned the ruler of this world. For John, judgment has already happened. Judgment means that the ways of the world have been proven wrong by God. By ways of the world I mean things like a desire for power, status, money, and success.
And that’s how we’ll introduce this text. Jesus is telling the disciples that through his upcoming death, resurrection, and ascension, God will make the most complete revelation of God’s nature to humanity. In Jesus giving away his life he reveals the truth of God’s nature as loving. In the resurrection he reveals that love is stronger than death. And in his leaving in the ascension he creates the space we need for God’s love to mature in us. Through all of that God is shown us righteous and the world is exposed in judgment for its wrong direction.
So, the text will still confuse us, but we’ll come back to interpret it with a message for All Saints Sunday.
Sermon:
I used to believe in progress. I thought that every day with enough work and discipline the world could be made a better place. But there was always the risk that ignorance or laziness could send the world backward.
I remember my first email address. It was 1992 and I could connect to this new thing called the internet through the mainframe computer at Penn State. Of course, email was just green letters on an otherwise black screen. But it was an exciting new thing! It was fresh and pure. There were any number of rules, all of them about keeping this new form of connection clean and good and safe. If you sent something that was meant to be funny you were supposed to create a smiley face with a colon and parenthesis to make sure the receiver knew it was intended to be funny.
But of course the internet did not stay so pure and fresh. In a few short years there were viruses, misinformation, and whole new industries of less-than-wholesome content.
It seems that for every good thing we humans create there is a bad potential to it. Even innocent things can lead to problems. Theologian, medical doctor, and professional organist Albert Schweitzer is among the most prominent people of the 20th century. He probably did more to lower infant and child mortality rates in Africa than any other person. And yet what are the results of his work?
Lowering childhood death rates means that more people reach adulthood. And with more people reaching adulthood there are more people competing for limited resources. And with more people competing for limited resources there is more violence and warfare. And so, as the Poisonwood Bible points out, what Schweitzer really did is allow the children to grow up so that they can now kill each other in wars.
It seems as if no matter how good and loving and selfless we want to be, evil is right there. In Romans 7 Paul even says, “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.”
Is there any way at all to escape from this?
That is what our gospel answers. Let’s go back to sin, righteousness, and judgment.
God’s judgment is not about condemning the world so much as it’s about proving that the ways of the world are wrong. Self-gift leading to death is not the end. It is actually the death of death.
Righteousness is about being in relationship with God. And sin is about believing that Jesus is God’s revelation of relationship. And so, for our own lives we are confident to live as Jesus lived. To us it doesn’t matter if sin distorts everything we do into a mess. We know that sin does not have the final word.
Why do we spread the gospel? It is not so much about making sure people can get to heaven after they die. That is God’s business. We spread the gospel because the only real hope this world has is for people to live in hope of God’s promises. The only way that a good thing does not immediately start to turn to something bad is when whole communities and societies build their principles around God’s love.
That sort of thing can’t be legislated. It has to be lived and believed. That is the only way the constant disasters and messes will ever stop.
That sort of thing only comes through close community; just as the community Jesus built among the disciples.
Summing up the entire gospel reading in one sentence, (and giving it an All Saints Sunday interpretation) Jesus has shown us the way, and as we live we trust it to be the way this world can be a truly good place.
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