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Sermons:
Ascension Day:
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God of Relationship
based on John 17:20-26
Rev. Karen Goltz
All four gospels are primarily concerned with
telling the story of Jesus, telling about his life, his death, and his
resurrection. All four of them have that in common. But all four of them are
telling that story for very different reasons.
Mark’s gospel is believed to be the first
gospel, written about forty years after Jesus’ death. Its original audience was
a group of Christians who were also solidly within the Jewish community. In
their very recent past, like within the last ten years or so, Jews had revolted
against Roman rule, only to have Jerusalem sacked and the Temple destroyed.
This community still understood Jesus to be the Messiah, the savior, but they
had to rethink what exactly that meant. Up until then they’d believed that the
Messiah was an apocalyptic figure, who would bring about the end of the world as
they knew it, overthrow their Roman oppressors, and restore the nation of Israel
to her original, political glory. With the failure of the Jewish revolt, they
were beginning to understand that the Messiah brought about salvation in a
different way, in a spiritual, transformative way that was rooted in Jesus as
the suffering servant described in Isaiah. So Mark’s gospel was written to help
people better understand what kind of Messiah Jesus really was.
Matthew’s gospel was written about ten years or
so after Mark, and the concern for the community then was figuring out the
position of the Christian church within Israel. Christians were still mostly
Jews, though on the fringes of Judaism. Judaism itself was struggling to figure
out what its own future would be—either continuing to follow the Torah and wait
for the Messiah promised in the Hebrew Scriptures, or else accept that the
Messiah had already come as Jesus, and move forward from there. The first view
was winning out. Matthew’s community was of the latter opinion, and Matthew’s
gospel strives to show how Jesus was the fulfillment and embodiment of the
Torah, and was thus the future of Judaism.
Luke’s gospel was written not long after
Matthew’s, though for an entirely different audience. While Matthew wrote for
Jewish Christians trying to shape the future of Judaism, Luke was written for a
mostly Gentile audience, and it explains how the message of Jesus reached beyond
the Jewish community. This isn’t clear if you just read Luke alone, but it’s
important to remember that the gospel of Luke is only the first volume in a
two-volume set—the second volume is the book of Acts. So when you read Luke and
Acts together as a single book, the way they’re supposed to be read, you see how
what was promised as a Jewish Messiah actually offers a message of hope and
salvation to all, regardless of religious or cultural origins. Jesus’
universality is stressed in Luke-Acts.
And then we get to John’s gospel. Written
sometime after Luke-Acts, perhaps as many as eighty years after the crucifixion,
John’s gospel is different. Whereas in the first three gospels Jesus is a very
human figure, the Jesus shown in John appears considerably more spiritual. In
fact, many scholars call John’s gospel the ‘spiritual’ gospel. But what is its
primary focus?
Like the other gospels, John shows Jesus as a
healer, a teacher, and a miracle worker. But in John, virtually everything
Jesus says and does points to God the Father, and highlights the unique
relationship between God the Father and Jesus, Son of God. Jesus is one with
the Father, and makes clear that his Father is Yahweh, the God who created the
world, the God who revealed himself to Abraham, to Moses, and who was with the
Jewish people throughout their entire existence. And what the Jesus in John’s
gospel does is demonstrate that if you really want to know God, if you really
want to know the mind of God and the will of God, then you’ll get to know Jesus,
his Son. All throughout John’s gospel, Jesus makes this point. Early in the
gospel, when the Pharisee Nicodemus comes to him by night, not to trap him but
to understand him, Jesus tells him that God did not send the Son into the world
to condemn the world, but to save it. Next he tells a Samaritan woman of
questionable moral standing that he is the Messiah, the bringer of salvation,
come to help people worship the Father in spirit and truth. Later, after
healing a lame man on the Sabbath, he declares that the Son can do nothing
except what he sees his Father doing, and he sees his Father still working to
bring life to the world. After feeding the five thousand, Jesus points to his
Father as the one who not only made that miracle possible, but was also the one
responsible for providing manna in the wilderness during their wanderings in the
desert so many years ago. And on and on it continues.
Throughout the gospel, Jesus emphasizes the
relationship he has with the Father, until he dines in the upper room with his
disciples on the night in which he was betrayed. He begins by humbling himself
and washing their feet, an act of service, devotion, and love, and then
instructs them to follow his example and act according to the same love and
humility towards one another. Then, knowing what will soon happen to him and
that he will no longer be physically with his disciples, he begins to prepare
them for life after his crucifixion, telling them what they must do and what
they can expect. His disciples are afraid and confused, and ask him many
questions which he answers. And then he prays for them.
And here is the crux of John’s gospel. What we have here is a glimpse of a
private conversation between two persons [continue]
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