The Life-Giving Authority of Jesus

So as we continue our sermon series today on John, I want to start off with a few reflective questions. What if following Jesus isn't just about what we believe, but what if it is also about what we expect of Jesus? And what if those expectations that we have of Jesus therefore shape how we feel, how we think, and then how we love and how we live. What if it is just as important that we do what Jesus tells us to do as it is for us to be thoughtful about what kind of authority we believe Jesus has over us? In the 5th chapter of John, the Jewish community who watched Jesus heal a man on the Sabbath were confronted with these very same questions. They witnessed Jesus make an intentional choice in how he would use his authority, and then this Jewish audience had to wrestle with what they believed about what Jesus was saying about his authority. If we watch the behavior of this Jewish crowd in the scripture we're going to explore together today. I wanna invite us to watch that behavior with empathy because I believe that we will see some of the reasons behind why they behaved the way that they did and why we sometimes behave the way that we do in our lives today. And so as we explore this scripture passage today in John chapter 5, I believe we'll find the following main idea. That the good news of Jesus's shared authority with the Father is that Jesus uses his power to bring forth new life in us and between us. The good news of Jesus's shared authority with the Father is that Jesus uses his power to bring forth new life in in and between us. I've called this sermon today, "The Life-Giving Authority of Jesus." I invite you to pray with me as we prepare to explore scripture together. Lord, we have so much to try and wrestle with as we try and figure out how to live out our faith. But Lord, I'm grateful that you give us a lifetime to do that and that you give us the scriptures that record how you moved through the world, what you've said, what you've taught. And then you give us a community with whom to wrestle with as we try and figure out our faith. And so, Lord, as we dig into scripture today, I pray that you would remind us of these things that you've given us— your word, your spirit, your example in your son— so that as we ask the question, how should we love, we'll come away with peace, with a little bit more certainty in the answer to that question. Lord, I thank you that you desire for us to know how to live in love. And I know that you will be faithful in revealing your Son to us today. In Jesus' name I pray, amen. So I want to just invite you to read from your seats, if you will, this scripture from John chapter 5, verses 19 through 24, then 37 through 40. Let's read together. Jesus replied, "Truly I tell you, the Son is not able to do anything on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, the Son likewise does these things. For the Father loves the Son and shows him everything he is doing." and he will show him greater works than these so that you will be amazed. And just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so the Son also gives life to whom he wants. The Father, in fact, judges no one but has given all judgment to the Son so that all people may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Anyone who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him. Truly I tell you, anyone who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not come under judgment that has passed from death to life. The Father who sent me has himself himself testified about me. You have not heard his voice at any time, and you haven't seen his form. You don't have his word residing in you because you don't believe the one he sent. You pore over the scriptures because you think you have eternal life in them, and yet they testify about me. 'But you are not willing to come to me so that you may have life.' This is the word of the Lord. And the people said, 'Thanks be to God.' I pray that this would fill our minds, flow from our mouths, and free our hearts to help us live as the beloved children of God. So let's take a moment to just explore some of what's happening here in the scripture. As we learned during Reverend Nancy's sermon last week, Jesus has just healed a man at the pool of Bethesda. Betsaida on the Sabbath. This is a man who had been crippled, who had been lame for 38 years, and Jesus decides to heal him on the Sabbath. After the man finally figures out who it was that healed him, because he didn't initially know, he goes back to the Jewish leaders and says, you know, "Hey, just figured out that it was Jesus who healed me." And that inflamed the Jewish leaders even more. So they go back to Jesus and they start questioning the audacity that he had to do healing work on the Sabbath. As you may recall, or as you may know, the ancient and even current Jewish custom is to avoid doing any labor or healing work on the Sabbath as a way to honor God liberating the people from Israel, uh, the people of Israel from Egypt. This is a way that they engage in their faith. And so it was scandalous for these Jewish leaders to see this man, this Jewish man, Jesus, doing this work on the Sabbath. And so what we're seeing here is a wrestling with expectation. The Jewish leadership know that Jewish people don't do work on the Sabbath. They don't heal on the Sabbath, and they also don't make claims about sharing substance and personhood and equality with God, Sabbath or not. So these are things that we're seeing already coming up in this moment that the audience that Jesus has healed this man in front of are wrestling with. And so what we find in the scripture that we just read are 3 claims that I believe Jesus is making. The first is that everything God does, Jesus does in the same way and at the same time. The second, not honoring the authority of Jesus is equal to not honoring the authority of the Father. And third, Jesus's authority is the source of life, both here and eternally. Let's start off with Jesus's first claim. In verses 19 through 20, Jesus says, "Truly I tell you, the Son is not able to do anything on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, the Son likewise does these things. For the Father loves the Son and shows him everything he is doing, and he will show him greater works than these so that you will be amazed." Jesus is describing the very intimate relationship that he has with the Father. And it's not just the kind of relationship of apprenticeship, because that's the imagery that he is evoking here, that there is an eldest son watching his father do his work in the shop or in the market with the anticipation of taking over that trade later on in the future. That's the imagery that Jesus is evoking here when he says, "The Father shows the Son, everything that he does. But he takes it a step further. He says that I am literally— I'm not even able to move myself away from what the Father does. I have no ability to do it. So if God is in heaven doing this thing, you're gonna see me doing it here on earth. This was a scandalous claim that he was making here about himself. Plenty of people in the Old Testament and throughout Jewish history have called themselves children of God. That wasn't the issue. But Jesus was saying, "I am sharing substance with God. I am so intimate with God that every move he makes, I make, and therefore every move I make, he makes." Here is what New Testament scholar John D. Moody says about this moment. Jesus calling God his own Father makes a great difference. It signals that Jesus makes a unique claim of sonship for himself. And at this point, one might expect him to then deny the charge that he is making himself also equal to God. But the reader should recall that such equality with God is exactly the claim that this Gospel, the Gospel of John, makes for Jesus. For Jesus to deny in the face of these accusations that the Jewish audience was making would be disingenuous, to say the least. So this commentary is helping us understand that Jesus is taking things a step further here. Yes, he is claiming to be the Son of God, but he is also claiming to be equal with God. But here's what else stands out to me about Jesus's claim. Jesus is not only telling us who he is, so he's clarifying for us his identity here, but he is also telling us what kind of being God is. He says, "I do nothing on my own, but only what I see the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, the Son likewise does these things." Jesus is essentially saying, "If you see me doing something like forsaking a Jewish custom and choosing to heal a man on a Sabbath," That is also what the Father does. Jesus was making the bold claim that all the scandalous action that he had been taking up until this point in the Gospel of John— healing a man on the Sabbath in John chapter 5, crossing gender lines and cultural historical lines and spending intimate time with a Samaritan woman in John chapter 4, thinking so highly of of a family's honor at a wedding at Cana in John chapter 3, that he turned water into wine. Jesus is saying that all of those scandalous actions that you saw me do, you can also expect God to engage in those same scandalous love-motivated actions for us. This was bold. I love the way that Bradley Jersak puts it in his book, A More Christlike God. This is one of my favorite books. Here's what he says: What if Jesus's humility, meekness, and servant heart were never a departure from God's glory and power, but actually define it and demonstrate it? And Bradley kind of feels himself here. For a second. He says, "Take your time, read that sentence again. What if kenosis, self-emptying power, self-giving love, and radical servanthood expresses the very nature of God? What if God does rule and reign not through imperial power, but through kenotic love?" What Jurczak is describing here is the terminology that we get from Philippians chapter 2 where it says that Jesus emptied himself, taking on the likeness of a servant, the likeness of humanity, that this was the way that Jesus chose to show his power. Jurczak is asking us, what if this wasn't Jesus separating himself from God and showing up differently from God, but this is the very nature of God showing up in Jesus's actions? That the character of God is not limited to might, to coercion, to force, to domination, but it is actually defined by servanthood, humility, meekness. Family, do we believe this? Do we believe that the nature of the being that we can't comprehend, which I want to validate for us, there's no way that we could fully comprehend God, but when we imagine him, Do we imagine him the way Jesus showed up in the world? Do we imagine him pausing for people who everyone else has cast aside and rejected? Do we imagine him being gentle in moments where people want him to show force and to be hostile? Or do we expect something different? If we're really honest? Do we expect anger, domination, force? As we continue reading what Jesus says about himself, and therefore about God, we'll find our second claim. The not honoring the authority of Jesus and the way that it shows up is equal to not honoring the authority of the Father. In verses 21 through 22, Jesus says, "And just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so the Son also gives life to whom he wants." Jesus is saying that same power that you Jewish audience have only assigned to God— because Jewish people believe that it is only God who can give life, who can be the the source of life and who can resurrect. Jesus is saying, "I have that same power. God has given that to me." And then he takes it a step further and he says, "In fact, the Father judges no one but has given all judgment to the Son." Again, Jewish belief says that it is only the Father that determines what is moral, what is right, what is good, what is true. And Jesus is saying, "God has given that power. God has trusted that power over to me." Jesus is getting more and more scandalous as the moment passes. Jesus knew that his Jewish audience expected a certain kind of behavior from God. They expected God to move with might and with force, and where the law set a boundary, because they believed that God couldn't deter from his law, it was hard for them to imagine God operating outside of that boundary. Hence, the scandal of Jesus healing on the Sabbath. And so when they see Jesus healing in a way that broke the Sabbath law, they were unwilling to imagine that Jesus' claims that he shared essence with God were true. And so Jesus made it even more plain. He said that if you're unwilling then to un— to not honor the way that I move and the way that I use my authority, you are also rejecting the authority of God. In March 2014, I took over my first team at the JCPenney call center, and I was at that time the youngest manager and one of the newest employees. I had only been at the call center since March 2013, so I'd only been there for a year. Now, I grew up shopping at JCPenney, so this was actually really special for me. But I don't know if you all know anything about JCPenney, but there is a certain kind of customer demographic that gravitates toward JCPenney. They tend to be older. They tend to just, "I've been shopping at JCPenney since 1936 and I'm still shopping there." That is also reflective of the employee demographics. Most of the people in the call center, there had been like a trickle, like an increase of younger people, but a lot of people in the call center were age 50 and up. And so I'm coming in to take over a call center team and I was younger than everyone but 2 members. Of my team. You might imagine that they were skeptical of me. One of the things that I try to remember as I reflect on my time getting to know my team when I took the team over is that what they expected of me shaped how they treated me. And that given their life experience, it made sense that I didn't match what they expected of me. All the other managers in JCPenney were older than me. They had more experience than me. It made sense that they were like, "Who is this 20-something coming up in here thinking that she gonna tell us what to do?" It made sense. The thing that's important for us to remember about human functioning is that we often don't honor or respect authority that doesn't show up the way that we think it should. This is just human nature. When we have a certain paradigm in our minds of, "This is what I think is legitimate," when things deviate from that, we don't immediately give it our trust. And so I had a lot of work to do to build trust with my team, to show them that I cared for them. But I also had to honor the fact that their skepticism was valid. Understanding this has helped me have empathy not only for my JCPenney team, but also for these Jewish leaders who are reacting to Jesus the way that they are. In their mind, they are expecting God to show up a certain way. They are not expecting God to show up in human form as a man who breaks the Sabbath. And so of course they bucked up against Jesus's authority. But what I wanna invite us to imagine is that if we do the work of taking Jesus seriously when he says, "The way that I move is how God moves," if we do the work of taking that seriously and molding our minds to look in the world and say, This is how I am expecting God to show up in this moment. Not as coercive, not as domineering, but as gentle, as meek, as servant-oriented, as concerned about the needs of the vulnerable. When we do that work to look for God moving in that way, then we will begin to expect God to move in that way. Another quote from Jurczak's book that I really love says this: What if the first beatitude, blessed are the poor in spirit, theirs is the kingdom of heaven, is a vision of the glory of God lived through Christ? Wherever God, wherever Christ, wherever we risk emptying ourselves, this kenosis, of self-will, of self-rule, to make space for the other, that is where the supernatural kingdom love of God rules and reigns. Thus kenosis, which is to say love, is the heart of who God is. Not lording over, but always coming under. Not triumphing through conquest, but through the love of the cross. God's being and God's power are his kenotic love. We are being invited to see God as the God who is willing to engage in scandal on the Sabbath. The God who is willing to see that we have a need and who is willing to use his immense and infinite creativity to make sure that that need is met. Framley Could it be that that is also what the cross embodies? That all of the accumulation of sin in human history should have kept accumulating and just leading to more and more destruction, and yet the Trinity decided to send God in human form and model for us what it looks like to be in right relationship with God and in right relationship with creation and then to to solve the problem of sin and death and evil completely. Isn't that the scandal of God's love? That God didn't just let the trajectory of evil keep going, but God intervened. This is what Jesus is inviting us to believe about God. That where we want to limit God and say that this is how God should always show up, God becomes even more scandalous and even more love-oriented. Finally, Jesus makes his, his final point in verses 24:37-40. He says Jesus's authority, in sum, is the source of life both here and now and eternally. Here's what he says in verses 39 and 40. He says, "You pour over the scripture because you think you have eternal life in them." Now this is again, he's as a Jewish man, he's saying back to this Jewish audience what they believed about the scripture. They believed that if they adhere to the scripture, it would lead to long life and healthy land. But Jesus is saying, "I am the one that these scriptures testify about." The Spirit within me is what these scriptures testify about, and yet you are not willing to come to me so that you have life. This was something that was very difficult for the Jewish people to kind of twist their mind around, because of course they had spent thousands of years, hundreds of years thinking about scripture as their source. They said, if we adhere to these scriptures, then we achieve the kind of life that we believe God has for us. But Jesus is asking them to imagine that he holds within himself, he embodies, he does all actions in line with the scriptures, and therefore, if they honor his authority, they get the life out of the scriptures that they have been desiring. Family, one question I wanna ask ourselves in response to what Jesus is saying here is do we come to Jesus expecting life? Do we come to Jesus with the intent to come under his authority? Which for a lot of us, because many of us grew up in kind of a legalistic kind of faith that said you just, you obey no matter what you feel, that might be the easy part for many of us. So do we come to Jesus with the intent to come under his authority while also expecting life and flourishing in return? Do we expect things like love to multiply in our lives when we come under the authority of Jesus? Do we expect things like joy to multiply in our lives when we come under the authority of Jesus? Or do we just kind of do it begrudgingly and we said, "You know what, I just have to do what Jesus tells me and maybe, maybe I get some joy out of it, maybe not. That's just my lot in life." Do we think it's scandalous to expect flourishing under Jesus's leadership? How we view Jesus How we view God matters. In a national study published in 2021 called Attachment to God and Psychological Distress, what they found after they surveyed, looked through the data of 1,600 Americans was this: that religious believers who relate to God in an uncertain or anxious manner are more likely to experience symptoms of psychological distress, including anxiety, paranoia, obsession, and compulsion. What we think Jesus should do with his power affects what we expect of Jesus. And when this study looked at how punitive or wrathful people believed God to be, the study found an increase in anxiety, in an anxious need to engage in impulsive behavior in hopes of calming that anxiety? And as you might imagine, emotional experiences like this extend from our relationship with God, and then they also extend to how we behave with others. The more anxious we are with God, expecting God to constantly respond to us in a punitive way instead of in a life-giving and loving way, We take that same kind of posture into the way we relate with our neighbor. And so I want to end today with answering the question, "What then should we expect of Jesus's authority?" How should we expect Jesus's power, God's power, to show up in the world and how it should feel? Feel. In John chapter 14, verses 9 through 12, Jesus says, as the Father has loved me, I have also loved you. Therefore remain in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commands and remain in his love. I have told you these things, not just referring to this, Jesus is referring to all of his teaching. I have told you all of these things so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete. This is my command: love one another as I have loved you. Framley, could it be that what Jesus is saying is that when we follow not only what he says but also what he does, that what we should get out of that is not just this obligator— obligatory kind of grudging way of responding to God's power, but could it be that Jesus is saying that we should also get joy and an increase of love out of following Jesus's authority? And not joy in this kind of superficial, "I'm happy all the time" kind of way, but rather an assurance in the future that Jesus promises for us. That regardless of what situation we are in, we know that God is constantly working good out of and through every situation. That is the joy that Jesus promises on the other side of his authority. And so, family, my hope for us today is that we would believe this claim, that it is actually good news for us to come under the authority of Jesus because we know that it will bring forth not just eternal life, we know that we have that as a security that we get through the resurrection, But we also get life and flourishing here in this world. We get a foretaste of that eternal life through the love and the joy that comes out of submitting to Jesus's authority. So, family, my bold request of us is that we would expect it, that we would look for it, that we would move through life saying that even in these difficult times, I will look for the love and flourishing that God promises. Because it is there alongside of the suffering, alongside of the darkness. God's love and God's joy promises to be evident in this world. And so here are the reflections, prayers, and actions I wanna invite you into for the next week. As I close, I want to invite you to continue reflecting on the question, "Do I come to Jesus expecting life in return? When I pray, do I expect Jesus to respond to me with anger, with irritation? Or do I expect for Jesus to find creative ways to bring about life and flourishing in response to to my prayer? And family, this doesn't mean that all your prayers are gonna look the way that you want them to, all your answers are gonna look the way that you want them to, but it will shape your internal life if you begin asking the question, "What do I expect of Jesus?" So that is what this reflection is meant to do, to shape your internal world. And then I wanna invite you to pray. Lord, would you help me to expect the life-giving authority that you promise to embody? And then finally, I want to invite you to act. I want to invite you to study Jesus's Christ-likeness in the Gospels. As you find scriptures to read over the next several days, if you have some plans to study scripture, I want to invite you to go to the gospels first. The letters in the New Testament are helpful, but I wanna invite you to ask the question, "What does Jesus look like when he interacts with people?" And to look for those moments in the gospels. You can even just look at the first 5 chapters of John since that's where we've been in our sermon series. But study what Christlikeness looks like in the gospels. And then elevate Christlikeness in the world around you as you embody it within yourself. Ask the question that we used to ask in the '90s or the early 2000s: What would Jesus do? Right? I miss those bracelets. That was a good reminder, right? We've gotten so caught up in what would Paul say that we've forgotten to ask what would Jesus do? And so I want to invite us to meditate on that question this week. What does Christ-likeness look like so that I can look for it and affirm it in the people around me and I can embody it in my own behavior? Amen. Amen. If you are able, I want to invite you to stand with me as our worship team comes back up to the stage. And then I will pray. Let's pray together. Lord, I thank you that you are faithful to reveal yourself in the person of Jesus. I thank you that when scripture is confusing, when we can't find an answer there, Lord, we can look to the things that Jesus did and said, and we can find more certainty in his behavior. Lord, I thank you that when you say that you have authority over our lives, it is not a coercive, forceful authority that we should fear, but it is an authority that we should desire love and life from. Because that is what you promised for us. So Lord, would you help us to be molded into Jesus followers who expect life from you? And would you help that expectation to shape the way that we live and love? In Jesus' name I pray. Amen.