At the end of the twentieth chapter of the Gospel of John, there are a couple of verses that are easy to skip over. “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book,” it says. “But these are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”

It sounds like a conclusion, but it isn’t. The book is not over yet and the next chapter will also end with what sounds like a conclusion. It seems to just be an explanation for why this Gospel doesn’t include some of the well-loved stories in the other Gospels, but it is so much more than that.

The Purpose of the Book

For, in these verses, the writer lays out the whole purpose behind the book. He has written “so that you may continue to believe.” Or other ancient manuscripts have it, “so that you may come to believe.”

Both ultimately mean the same thing. He is writing so that you, the reader, might believe in the messiahship of Jesus and that your life might be transformed – that by trusting in him, you might have life.

And you might say, sure, that makes sense. Isn’t that why anybody wrote any gospel? But wait a minute. When John says that, he is not referring to the whole gospel. He is saying something very specific. He is saying that Jesus performed many signs. He is referring to the miracles and wonders that Jesus performed, of course, but he uses the word signs. A sign is something (anything) that conveys meaning.

The Seven Signs

And what the author is saying is that he has carefully chosen not to tell the stories about all the signs, that he has specifically chosen only certain signs because they are the ones that will make you believe. So, he is not talking about the whole gospel, but rather his collection of sign stories.

And once you look back through the whole gospel, you realize exactly what he is talking about. John, in the course of his Gospel, has told us exactly seven stories of seven signs that Jesus performed, carefully labelling each one as they come as a sign.

The seven signs in the Gospel of John are:

Turning Water into Wine (John 2:1-11)
Healing the Official’s Son (John 4:46-54)
Healing the Lame Man (John 5:1-15)
Feeding the Five Thousand (John 6:1-14)
Walking on Water (John 6:15-21)
Healing the Blind Man (John 9:1-41)
Raising Lazarus from the Dead (John 11:1-44)

So, what John is saying is that, if you will just reflect on these seven stories, you will believe.

Why the Disciples Believed

In our reading today, we have just gone through the whole problem with making people believe. Jesus has appeared to the disciples on Easter Sunday, convincing them that he is truly risen. They believe because they have seen it.

But then Thomas comes into the story. He wasn’t there that first Sunday. He didn’t see, so he doesn’t believe and he insists that he cannot take anyone else’s word for it. He has to see and touch and feel for himself.

This all gets resolved for Thomas, of course, when Jesus puts in a second appearance. But the question still remains. That’s great for Thomas, but what about the rest of us? The story ends with Jesus saying, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” But that doesn’t address the real problem. How do you come to believe without seeing? Do you just have to take those who did see at their word? Because I know that doesn’t seem good enough for many people.

How to Believe Without Seeing

Well, John answers that question in the verses that follow immediately after this story. He tells you how you may come to believe without seeing. And the answer, interestingly enough, is not that we have to take anybody else’s word for it. I mean, sure, the testimony of the disciples is important, but that is not the answer he points to.

No, he says that what you particularly need is to hear the stories of the seven signs. If that doesn’t do it for you, nothing will.

If you are feeling a little bit puzzled by that, I’ll admit that so am I. Let me suggest what I think we should do. Let us decide to look at those stories, not simply as stories of miracles and wonders, but as stories that are signs. Read them as stories that are intended to convey meaning directly to you, the reader.

Of course, doing that with all of the stories is a bit much for us to do right now. Perhaps you could consider it your homework to spend the time living with those seven stories. Maybe it’ll make a great seven-part sermon series some day.

But what we can do in this time we have today is give us a sense of what we need to look for in those stories – how to read the signs.

The Marriage in Cana

Let’s look at the first sign. This is set in the town of Cana in Galilee where Jesus is at a wedding with his disciples and his mother. During the festivities, the wine runs out – a social disaster. Jesus’ mother comes to him with the problem and he says, “Woman, what concern is that to me and to you? My hour has not yet come.” (2:4)

So, Jesus is clearly reluctant to do anything, not because he doesn’t care about the problem, but just because he’s concerned about the timing. Nevertheless, his mother seems to know him better than he knows himself. She knows that he cares and so she says, “Do whatever he tells you,” to the servants. (2:5)

And so Jesus goes ahead and famously turns the water into wine. In fact, he creates wine that is so excellent and potent that the man in charge of the wedding (who doesn’t know where it came from) marvels at it.

And then the whole story gets summed up like this. “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee and revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him.” (2:11)

How Does this Help You Believe?

So, apparently, this story has been included in this gospel “so that you may come to believe.” But how does this story make you believe? You weren’t there at the wedding in Cana. You didn’t get to taste the wine. So how are you supposed to be convinced just by hearing this and stories like it?

Well, the odd thing about the story is that, even though Jesus does something miraculous, he doesn’t actually seem to be doing it to impress people with his miraculous powers. He doesn’t really want to attract attention by doing something splashy, and so he hesitates.

Even more important, he does it in a way that means that most people don’t know what he has done. The wine steward doesn’t know where the wine came from. The important guests don’t know either. All they know is that excellent wine is suddenly flowing.

It is only a select group that knows that Jesus has performed a wonder. The only people who it says know about it are the servants, the very people that everyone else would dismiss and look down upon. So, this is clearly not all about performing a wonder so that every notices and believes. It is much more subtle than that.

How Jesus Acts in These Stories

And, once you realize that, the observation applies to many of the other sign stories as well. Jesus never seems to seek the limelight. He is no publicity hound. Most of all, he usually acts in response to the suffering that he sees – the hunger of the crowds, the sorrow of the sisters, the unfair blaming of the blind man for his illness. These stories emphasize the sympathy and compassion of Jesus, not his showmanship.

All of that leads me to think that John is not pointing us to these sign stories in order that we might be convinced by them because there is something miraculous. If you struggle to believe because you did not see the risen body of Jesus, why would you be convinced by a story about wine that you didn’t get to taste? There has to be something else going on in these stories that is meant to break through your fog of hesitation and doubt.

About Jesus’ Identity

That is why I would insist that these stories are not about what Jesus does. They are about who Jesus is. They are signs that point to his identity, not his ability. And this is something that is made clear in a number of stories in which Jesus declares the meaning of what he is doing with an “I am…” statement. When we heals the blind man, he declares “I am the light of the world.” When he raises Lazarus, he says, “I am the resurrection and the life.” And he follows up the feeding of the five thousand by saying, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” (6:41)

So, what does John mean when he says, “But these are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God”? He is challenging you to reflect upon these stories so that you may discover the character of Jesus. He wants you to meditate upon them until you have a picture of a Jesus who is reaching out in love and compassion and care, who understands the suffering of the people and who can dissolve into tears when he sees Mary, the sister of Lazarus, weeping before him. John is convinced that, once you have found that picture, you will inevitably take the next step.

The Next Step

The next step is “to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.” Once you know what Jesus is like, you will recognize that there is something in that character that goes beyond the ordinary. There is something in Jesus that allows you to encounter the divine.

I do believe that the foundation of faith is experience. That much is clear in the Easter stories – especially the story of Thomas. After Jesus had been taken from them and crucified and buried, the early Christians experienced his living presence with them. All of the stories of his appearances are a reflection of those amazing experiences.

None of it constitutes scientific proof that Jesus really did rise from the dead. It could not be reproduced in a laboratory. None of the documentation can be independently verified especially because the texts that we have received contain inconsistencies, which is not unusual when you are talking about intensely personal experiences.

Experiencing God in Christ

But it had happened. They knew that it had happened because they had experienced it. These closing words of this chapter in the Gospel of John raise the issue of how we, who did not have those intense initial experiences, can come to know that truth as well as they did.

And so John points us to the signs stories in his Gospel. He says, “Reflect on these stories and you will discover the true nature of this Jesus. You will understand that he came to show us the face and the love of God.

But I think that there is one more step that is implied in this. For surely it is not enough to accept on an intellectual level that Jesus must have been the Messiah and the Son of God. In order to know the truth of that deep down in your soul, you have to experience it for yourself, just as the disciples experienced it in their own way.

Taking These Stories Seriously

John teaches you to experience that by challenging you to take these sign stories seriously in your life. You need to be willing to live in such a way that you expect to encounter the Jesus you meet in these stories.

When you have run out of wine – which I take as meaning when you come to a place where your life seems to have lost its meaning and purpose – take that to Jesus with the expectation that he will take your water and turn it into wine. You might be amazed by what you experience if you trust him.

And when you struggle with fear and anxiety in the midst of the storm, when you find that your basic needs are not being met like when the 5000 were starving, when you struggle with weakness or blindness or grief in the face of death, and all of the other things that people were struggling with in those seven stories, the promise is there that if you turn to Jesus in trust and expectation, you will encounter the same Jesus that they met. And you will know, as they knew, that he is the Messiah and the Son of God.

Nonsense!

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, April 20th, 2025 in Minister, News

Watch Sermon Video Here:

https://youtu.be/I14k5BJBfi4

Hespeler, April 20, 2025 © Scott McAndless – Easter Day
Acts 10:34-43, Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24, 1 Corinthians 15:19-26, Luke 24:1-12

When Mary, Mary, Joanna and the others returned from the tomb on Sunday morning, the male disciples were already upset with them. They hadn’t wanted them to go out in the first place. The men thought that what they were doing by laying low in response to the terrible things that had occurred was the only wise course.

But the women had gone anyway and when they came back with their tales of an open and empty tomb, of men dressed in shiny disco clothes and reminders of what Jesus had promised them back in Galilee, the men kind of lost it on them.

Idle Tales

“Those are idle tales,” they cried. At least that is how the New Revised Standard Version translates it in rather understated fashion. Other translations are not so kind. “Nonsense!” is how some of the others have it. And that is what the word means. “Balderdash! Claptrap! Malarkey and something that a bull might produce!” That’s what they were saying.

And I know that it is tempting (especially as we read this story with the hindsight of 2000 years of Christian tradition) to be hard on the disciples for this response. I mean, we know that the women’s tale is anything but nonsense. But I do not want to move on from what they say too quickly. I think we should take a little time to at least understand where they are coming from at this point.

Misogyny

What are these men really saying? Are they simply dismissing the women’s story because they are women? Is this just pure misogyny and a group of men who are refusing to learn anything from them simply because they are women?

Well, let’s be honest here. Maybe that is a part of what is going on. How many times has it happen throughout history that men have failed to learn important things simply because they wouldn’t listen to women?

But, putting their thoughtless misogyny aside for a moment, I think that we can understand where they are coming from because let’s look at it all very practically. It was nonsense.

Clash of the Kingdoms

Jesus had shown up on the scene announcing the arrival of this thing that he called the kingdom of God. And, while he never quite said exactly what this kingdom was, one thing was quite clear.

It was not the kingdom of Herod Antipas, which was built upon the exploitation of the farmers and the fishers of Galilee. Nor was it the kingdom (or we should call it the Empire) of Rome which had managed to enslave around 15 million people and was systematically transferring the wealth of the entire Mediterranean Basin to 1% of the population in the city of Rome.

An Alternate Kingdom

No, the kingdom that Jesus imagined was nothing like that. He told stories of a kingdom that ended with the entire order of society getting turned upside down so that the first would be last and the last would be first. He said his kingdom would belong to the poor and the hungry and the sorrowful while the rich and well-fed and laughing would all be excluded.

I mean, if that’s not nonsense I don’t know what is. There are certain structures of power in this world and none of them are about to give up their position and privilege just because some preacher comes along announcing that “the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

And, sure, maybe for a little while the disciples had been taken in by the dream of the kingdom that Jesus had spun. They had hoped that maybe things could actually be different and work differently. But hadn’t recent events made it clear to them that the dream was not going to work out? Society was not going to be turned upside down. No one was giving any kingdom to the poor. It was just nonsense.

Place for the Outsider

What’s more, Jesus told of a kingdom where there was a place for everyone. His parables ended with the poor, the blind and the lame sitting at tables and feasting – the kind of thing that was never permitted to happen because everyone accepted that there were just certain people who had to be excluded.

But Jesus never lived that way. He was always a friend to the outsider – especially to those whom everyone else dismissed as sinners. The prostitutes and the tax collectors always had a place at his table. He even reached out with compassion towards the sick and infected, whom everyone else rejected in scorn.

Upsetting the Society

The people around him were appalled. If the very idea that everyone had to stick to their place in society was challenged, they feared that their whole society would collapse around them. So of course, everyone hated what he was doing. But once again the disciples had been hoodwinked. They had allowed themselves to think that his crazy social engineering experiment could actually work.

But they had learned better now. Far from crumbling before Jesus’ onslaught, the social order had lashed out at him, turning him into the outsider rejected by all. It had sent him out from among the people to a lonely outcropping where he was counted among the cursed and nailed to a tree. His very idea that anything could breach the order of such a society had been exposed as pure nonsense.

Violence

Jesus had also appeared on the scene, suggesting that there might be a different way to deal with the problem of violence. You see, the world has always taught us that the only way to end violence is with more violence.

That is the plot to all of our stories. We tell about the lone gunslinger who comes to town and shoots all the bad guys. We make movies about superheroes who band together to stop the supervillains by punching their way through legions of his minions. Everything we hear reinforces the idea that the only one who can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

That is just the way that our world has always worked, often leading to violence spiralling out of control. And then Jesus came along, teaching people not to resist the evildoer and to respond to violence by turning the other cheek. He said that “all who take the sword will die by the sword,” (Matthew 26:52) and called the peacemakers blessed.

The disciples naively found this idea compelling. It was nice to dream of a world without violence. But then reality struck hard. When the violent finally came at Jesus with their clubs and swords and torches, he foolishly held onto what he had taught. He did not fight back. He didn’t even raise his voice in anger.

And where did that get him? Did it result in a better world and an end to violence. No, it ended on a cross in agony. It ended with the purveyors of violence leaning back with a smug satisfied grin on their faces. They had won yet again.

Yes, that whole idea that Jesus had preached that love was stronger than hate and that the meek could inherit the earth had been shown up for what it truly was. And it was in bitterness and deep despair that the disciples deflected their anger for having been duped onto the women and called what they said nonsense.

Death’s Victory

Perhaps even more importantly, Jesus had said that he was all about life. He said that this was why had he had come, “that they may have life and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10) And he even held out the promise of life eternal and suggested that people might find the resurrection in him.

I mean, what had they been thinking? That he could defeat the oldest enemy that humanity has ever faced? For millions of years, everything that had ever lived on the face of the earth had died. It was the one sure thing that everyone would have to face.

Did they really think that he could do anything about all of that? No. It was like death took everything he had ever said or promised about life as a challenge. Death threw everything that it had at him. It came at him with all of its power of pain and isolation and weakness.

Put on Display

It wasn’t satisfied just with extinguishing him. It put him on display for everyone to see. It made him struggle right up to his very last breath so that everyone could see that death’s rule over this world could never be broken. Its dominion would last forever and ever!

If anything, that made what these women were now saying not just nonsense. It made it offensive. To suggest that, after all of that, that we should not seek the living among the dead was the worst kind of denialism.

Felt Like Fools

So why is it that the disciples rejected what the women said as nonsense and idle tales? Yes, maybe, there was a bit of misogyny in it. But the real reason is that they had been shown that it was nonsense.

Yes, they felt like fools to have believed, even for a moment, that the evil kingdoms and empires of this world could fall, that cultural hatred and exclusion could ever be shaken, that we could ever realize that violence is not the solution; it is the problem. Most of all, they had finally realized that death always wins.

In so much of what Jesus had done and said, he had challenged and questioned the common sense of the world all around him. And now they had all seen that the world and all of its sense had had its way with Jesus. He was dead. He was gone. It was over. The disciples had had to conclude that it was all nonsense.

Unless

Unless, of course, what the women were saying was true. Unless the tomb really was open, the grave clothes abandoned, and the messengers of God let loose on the world. In that case, it might just be possible that the disciples had got it wrong.

If Jesus is risen from the dead, what does that mean? Does it mean that we get to go to heaven someday? Sure, that is part of it. But it is not just about what it will mean for us someday on the other side of death.

If we can get up on a Sunday like this, put on our best clothes, come to church and sing a few “hallelujahs,” and then go on home and continue with our lives as if nothing has changed, then we have not understood that what the women reported was nonsense. If we think that Jesus rose from the dead so that we can eat chocolate and roast lamb for today and change nothing tomorrow, we must learn from them.

Turning Sense to Nonsense

For what they observed at that tomb, was such nonsense that, if it is true, it means that so much of the sense we have taken as common is nonsense. If Jesus is not there, if he has risen just like he had said that he would do, then we have been looking for life in all the wrong places.

Do we think that the kingdoms and powers of this world will retain their place forever and ever? Do we think that the mighty and powerful will always prevail through violence? And do we suppose that we’re just supposed to go along with it when people are treated as if they are less than human just because they are different? Most of all, do we believe that death always has the final word? That is the sense that we have been fed all our lives, but if the women are right, then that is the nonsense.

Guess the number of pairs of socks! And the answer is …

Posted by StAndrewsHespeler on Wednesday, April 16th, 2025 in News

What was your guess!

« Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 … 275 Next »