Introduction
I was looking at a Calvin and
Hobbes cartoon this week in which Calvin’s mum and dad are unable to sleep
in the middle of the night. Mum says, “Are you still awake too?”
And dad says, “Mm-hmm. I was
thinking. It’s funny… when I was a kid, I thought grown-ups never worried about
anything. I trusted my parents to take care of everything, and it never
occurred to me that they might not know how. I figured that once you grew up,
you automatically knew what to do in any given scenario. I don’t think I’d have
been in such a hurry to reach adulthood if I’d known the whole thing was going
to be ad-libbed.”
Well, I think that’s brilliant.
And I think that’s what many people feel, especially parents of kids like
Calvin. If you know the comic strip, you’ll understand.
We’ve been looking at some of different reasons why Jesus came, as we prepare to celebrate his coming to earth at Christmas.
- He came not to judge the world but to save the world.
- He came not to be served but to serve.
- He came not to abolish but to fulfil the law.
Last week, Erin was telling us
about what Jesus himself said, “I came to call not the righteous but sinners to
repentance.”
Today, we’re going to focus on
another reason he gave as to why he came to earth.
And it’s in John 12.46 - “I have come into the world as a light, so that
no one who believes in me should stay in darkness.”
This is great news for people
who lie awake all night worrying that their ad-libbing of life is not going
well.
Context of John 12
If you were a preacher, and you
knew that your next sermon would be your last, what do you think you might say?
… You wouldn’t waste time with frivolities. I think you would choose a theme of
fundamental and crucial importance.
Well, our reading from John’s
Gospel today is Jesus’ very last public sermon.
Let’s just get our bearings as we focus in on John chapter 12. It’s
important to understand when all this takes place. It starts with Mary
anointing Jesus’ feet with perfume (v1-11, which we looked at a month ago).
Then it continues with Jesus
entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday (v12-19). So, this chapter is situated in the
very last week of Jesus’ earthly life.
The next section (v20-36), is one last and desperate attempt to distract
Jesus from what he came to do. It says in v20 that some Greeks arrive in
Jerusalem looking for him.
There was a Greek community, south
east of Lake Galilee, that settled as a kind of colony after the time of
Alexander the Great about 300 years earlier. They built a network of small villages,
and they gave them a Greek name; Deca (meaning ten) and Polis (meaning town) -
the Decapolis.
Mark’s Gospel tells us that
Jesus had been there before, at least twice in fact. The first time he went, he
delivered a demon-possessed man, resulting in the eradication of the entire local
pig population. Yeah, ministry with Jesus does get a bit messy sometimes...
Being abruptly deprived of their
supply of bacon made the locals unhappy, understandably I think, so they asked Jesus
to leave. Which he did.
But sometime later, Jesus
returned to heal a deaf and mute man, and he more than made up for the bacon incident
by feeding 4,000 people with 7 loaves and a few small fish. After that, the
locals began to warm to him a bit more.
Which goes to show, if you’ve
got the catering sorted in church, there’s a good chance the church will grow.
Anyway, in John 12.20, a Greek delegation
arrives looking for Jesus, presumably so he can accompany them on a comeback tour.
And Jesus, in his full humanity,
is torn two ways. If he leaves Jerusalem now, he can be adored by a crowd where
he is growing in popularity. And - nice little bonus - it means he avoids the
cross, which he is absolutely dreading.
In v27, you see how conflicted
he is; “Now my soul is troubled,” he says. “What shall I say? Father, save me
from this hour?” “I could walk away from this violence, and public rejection, and
anguish, and flogging, and crucifixion, and excruciating death altogether.”
And then he settles the matter. “No,”
he says, “it was for this very reason that I came to this hour.” I didn’t come to be a rock star. I came to
lay down my life.
Here’s why Jesus came; to suffer
and die in your place and mine. To pay the price for sin, and pay it in full,
so we have no debt left towards God. To take the horrific consequences of this
broken world on himself. That’s why he came; it wasn’t about the straw in the
manger. It was about the thorns on the cross.
Then, from v37, as I said, John tells us about Jesus’ last public
sermon.
And here’s how it starts, v37.
“Even after Jesus had performed so many signs in their presence, [they were eye witnesses of amazing things] they
still would not [note that word, “would
not”] believe in him.
Days before, (chapter 11) Jesus
had raised from the grave a man called Lazarus; his corpse was well past rigor
mortis, it was now beginning to putrefy and decompose. He had been dead four
days.
Jesus says, ”No, we’re not
having that, I’m going to raise him up. I am the resurrection and the life.
Take the seal off the tomb and roll the stone away.”
They say to him, “No Lord, please
don’t do that. This is the Middle-East. It’s hot and humid. The smell will be
overwhelming.” Jesus says, “Never mind that. Go on, open it.”
So reluctantly, holding their
noses, expecting the gagging reflex at any time, they roll the tombstone to one
side. Jesus calls, “Lazarus, come out!” with such firmness, with such
conviction, with such authority, that Lazarus does not dare stay put.
At the word of Christ, his heart
begins to beat again. His feet begin to tingle and he wiggles his toes. He gets
up off his stone slab, and out he comes, breathing again, healthy as fresh
fruit. And Jesus says, “Right, take all that burial linen off, he won’t be
needing that, and let him go.”
Listen, however bound up in
worry, and despair, and death, and sin, you are today, Jesus has the authority
to say this morning, “Unbind him. Unbind her. Let them go free.”
This is what the people with
Jesus in John 12 have just witnessed, only days before. It’s still fresh in the
memory. But still, even after that, it’s scarcely believable but the Bible says here that some
people didn’t put their faith in him.
1. Unbelief (v37)
So here’s the first reason Jesus came as a light. It was to cast out the
darkness of unbelief.
50 years ago this day, the crew
of Apollo 8; Frank Borman, Bill Anders and Jim Lovell were on their way to the
moon. They would become the first humans to ever enter the moon’s orbit and swing
round the back of it.
It was that darkness; that
complete and absolute, jet-black, inky darkness of the heavens, when you look
at them in the void of space, without the filter of our atmosphere, that really
struck them. They said that, from the moon, the earth seems to be the only
colourful thing in the universe.
In the physical world, total
darkness, with no light at all, is actually the natural state of the universe.
We need the sun and an atmosphere to turn the sky blue. God has to say, “Let there be light” for
there to be any colour, and any visibility of anything at all.
Spiritually, Jesus is the light of life. He spoke of hell as a place of
perpetual, outer darkness. And the Book of Revelation speaks of heaven as so
full of life that you don’t even need the sun because Jesus is all the light
you need.
The former Bishop of London
Richard Chartres, once said that, when Jesus was born, there was brightness at
midnight; and when he died, the sun hid its face and there was darkness at midday.
Spiritual darkness is a closed
mind. The biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins says
that Christian faith is a delusion. It is us, he says, who are stuck in
the dark ages, ignorant and unenlightened. Many agree with him.
But John’s Gospel explains here what’s
really going on, quoting Isaiah in v39:
It isn’t just that they would not believe; it says here that
they could not believe.
“[God] has blinded their eyes
and hardened their hearts,
so they can neither see with
their eyes,
nor understand with their
hearts,
nor turn—and I would heal them.”
It’s saying what we know to be true.
Everybody here knows someone who, the more you talk to them about Jesus, the
less they believe, because they have already rejected God.
If you have already decided that
the good news about Jesus is not true, your heart grows harder and harder
against it. And God actually blinds your eyes and hardens your heart. He helps
you along the path you have already chosen and there comes a point when you’re
too far gone to come back.
Like Pharaoh in the Book of
Exodus. It says that God hardened his heart - and he did - but only after Pharaoh
had hardened his own heart seven times. That’s unbelief. It’s darkness, but
Jesus came as a light.
John says here that Isaiah saw
Jesus’ glory and spoke about him. It was Isaiah, 750 years before it happened,
who saw there was going to be a child, born of a virgin, who would be Immanuel,
God with us.
- Isaiah said he would be the Prince of Peace.
- Isaiah saw a man of sorrows who would suffer and bear the sins of others.
- Isaiah saw one who would be bruised and broken, and who would bring healing.
- Isaiah saw one who after his sufferings and death would see the light of life and be satisfied.
If you have already decided that
the gospel is not true, your heart grows harder and harder against it. You
could watch a paraplegic get dramatically healed right here and walk around
holding their wheelchair above their head - and you still would not believe it.
But if you have taken that first
step of faith and decided that the gospel is true, your heart softens more and
more and you find life in all its fullness.
A former President of the Royal
College of Psychiatrists, having studied a wealth of peer-reviewed research on
the effects of faith on human wellbeing wrote that, in the majority of studies
published, Christian faith is correlated, not with the darkness of ignorance,
but with:
- Greater well-being and life-satisfaction
- Increased hope and optimism
- Greater sense of purpose and meaning in life
- Higher self-esteem
- Better adaptation to bereavement
- Greater social support and less loneliness
- Lower rates of depression and faster recovery from depression
- Lower rates of suicide and fewer positive attitudes towards suicide
- Less anxiety
- Less psychosis and fewer psychotic tendencies
- Lower rates of alcohol and drug abuse
- Less delinquency and criminal activity
- Greater marital stability and satisfaction
2. Fear (v42-43)
Secondly, Jesus came as a light because of the darkness of fear.
The author Douglas Connelly tells the story of a limestone
cavern tour he took with his parents when he was a boy. You know how kids get
restless and curious sometimes? Well, he got bored with the guide's droning on
about geology so he decided to walk on ahead and see what was around the next
curve.
What he didn't know was that the guide was about to
demonstrate how dark the cave is when he turned off his torch. “I can still
remember” Douglas Connelly says, “the icy fingers of absolute darkness gripping
me in sheer terror.”
Even as adults we get edgy when we hear noises during the
night and we are shocked when violent crimes are committed in broad daylight,
as if evil belongs to the darkness of night. We associate darkness with
our fears.
When people fear not being loved, or illness or death, or
being a nobody, or whatever… they often say they’re in a pretty dark place.
Jesus came as a light.
But there’s another sort of fear here, and it’s in v42.
“Many even among the leaders believed in him. But because of the Pharisees they
would not openly acknowledge their faith for fear they would be put out of the
synagogue; for they loved human praise more than praise from God.”
They were afraid of people’s opinions. They were frightened
of giving offense. They were reluctant to get saddled with the label of
Christian – they craved popularity. They were scared of being excluded from the
in-crowd.
Unbelief closes people’s minds. But
fear closes people’s mouths. Unbelief is about not letting faith in. But fear
is about not letting faith out.
Letting faith in and letting
faith out are both really vital if you want to grow as a Christian.
Romans 10.9 says that it’s not
just about believing in your heart; as well as that, to be saved, you need to “declare with your mouth, Jesus is Lord.”
Jesus was very clear about this
is when he said, “Whoever is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be
ashamed of them.”
Can I just ask you to clench your fist as tightly as you
can? Look at your fist now. Inside your closed hand is absolute darkness. No
light can possibly get through. It's pitch black in there.
But once your hand is open to the light, (you can open your
palm now), where's the darkness gone? That is what happens when whatever you fear
is exposed to the presence and power of Jesus Christ.
3. Hopelessness (v46)
Finally, and briefly, Jesus came as a light because of the darkness of hopelessness.
Finally, and briefly, Jesus came as a light because of the darkness of hopelessness.
In v46, Jesus says, “I have come
into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in
darkness.
He talks about staying in darkness. This is not in and
out of a dark mood; this a prolonged period in a dark place, when hope begins
to run out.
When we see the first traces of hope in difficult times we
say, “There’s light at the end of the tunnel.” But with Jesus you can say, “There’s
enough light in the tunnel.”
People talk about the dark night of the soul, meaning a
season – months, years, of spiritual gloom and depression. “I have come as a
light,” says
Jesus. Is today the day you come out of a long season of
hopelessness?
Ending
A hundred years ago, an
American missionary called William Young took the gospel to East Burma. He
learned the generic language of the region and one day he was preaching in a
marketplace. And he held aloft his Bible with its white pages gleaming in the
morning sunlight he proclaimed the one God.
As he preached, some
strangely-dressed men at the edge of the crowd pushed their way to the front.
They were all agitated and excited. And, overflowing with emotion, they
approached William Young and said, “We’re from the Lahu tribe. We’ve been
waiting for you for centuries. We have prophecies that tell us that a white man
will come with a book from God, and will set us free. We have even built
meeting places ready for you. You must come with us now.”
They showed him their bracelets.
They said, “We have worn these rope bracelets since time immemorial. They are
placed on us at birth. They symbolise our bondage to evil spirits. And we know
that you alone, as the messenger of the one God, can cut these from our wrists,
when you have brought us the message from the book of the one creator God.”
That year, William Young
baptized 2,200 Lahu tribespeople. In the next few years after that he baptized
another 60,000. They had been waiting for God and for his word.
Jesus said, “I have come
into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in
darkness.”
Let’s stand to pray…
Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 23 December 2018
Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 23 December 2018
