One of the great joys of being a pastor is that you get to interact with lots and lots of people. One of the great difficulties of being a pastor is that you get to interact with lots and lots of people whose names you forget. What is worse is when you meet someone you know really well in a place that is out of context. You see a church friend at the shopping centre, or you see an old school friend at a music concert. Sometimes it takes a while for the brain to bring together their face, their name and where you know them from. It takes a while to recognise who is really standing in front of you, simply because you see a person “out of context”. That is almost like what is happening in our passage today. People see Jesus standing right in front of them, but they are struggling to recognise who he really is.
Let’s have a look.
Scripture: John 7:25-31 (ESV)
Some of the people of Jerusalem therefore said, “Is not this the man whom they seek to kill? And here he is, speaking openly, and they say nothing to him! Can it be that the authorities really know that this is the Christ? But we know where this man comes from, and when the Christ appears, no one will know where he comes from.”
So Jesus proclaimed, as he taught in the temple, “You know me, and you know where I come from. But I have not come of my own accord. He who sent me is true, and him you do not know. I know him, for I come from him, and he sent me.” So they were seeking to arrest him, but no one laid a hand on him, because his hour had not yet come. Yet many of the people believed in him. They said, “When the Christ appears, will he do more signs than this man has done?”
In this passage we see people really wrestling with who Jesus really is. A conspiracy theory starts: “Isn’t this the man they are seeking to kill?… Can it be that the authorities really know that this is the Christ?”. The people actually get to the right conclusion, and then doubt sets in, “We know where he comes from, but when the Messiah comes, no one will know where he is from”.
Do you see how their preconceived ideas about who the Messiah would would be, prevent them from seeing Jesus as he really is. They think they have it figured out, but their theology holds them back. How often this has been the case in the world, where our doctrines and theologies have held us back from deeper and truer relationship with Jesus. That is why we need to be so careful not to adopt the teachings of people, but to stick to the teachings of scripture. In the passage just before this Jesus tells the crowd to judge rightly about who he is, and now the people go ahead and judge wrongly based on faulty theology.
The need for people to accept Jesus as the Bible presents him to us seems to be all the more urgent these days. Only a few weeks ago the Catholic Pope said something that shocked me. This is translation “There’s only one God, and each of us has a language to arrive at God. Some are Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and they are different paths [to God]”. Now I want to be generous, and perhaps this is taken out of context, but this was the Pope’s remark at an interfaith dialogue in Singapore. [Read more here]. But even if I am being generous, no Christian who actually knows Jesus as he is revealed in the Bible can believe this. Jesus himself says that none can come to the Father, except through him.
Even if the pull of our culture is strong, we can’t bow to public pressure to reshape Christianity into a religion that affirms our world’s values. We cannot bend to reshape Jesus into someone our culture agrees with, but our Bible does not.
We, like some in our passage, need to believe in Jesus as he is. Not just as we would want him to be.
Prayer:
Dear Jesus, we are sorry for the way we have tried to reshape our understanding of you because of the way our culture influences us. Help us to always be captured by the vision of you that your word gives us. Amen.
Spiritual Challenge:
Today, make a list of 5 ways the world misunderstands who Jesus is. Share it with friend and see if they agree.