Sermon: Easter 6 – 2024

5 May 2024

Text: John 16:23-33

In the name of + Jesus.  Amen.

Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Alleluia! 

For three years, Jesus has been the teacher of His disciples, and of the entire world.  He has come to teach us about the kingdom of God, about who we really are, who God really is, and how the messiness of fallen creation is going to be sorted out in eternity.  And like any good teacher, Jesus doesn’t just talk while everyone sits and takes notes.  It is better if a student is able to figure things out on his own, based on the wise guidance of his teacher, rather than simply parroting back what the teacher says in order to get a good grade on the test.

In other words, Jesus isn’t just having the disciples memorize disconnected facts.  Rather, Jesus brings his students into the story itself – showing them, with words and with deeds, the God who is His Father, and showing them that He is also God in the flesh.  Jesus reveals the Trinity to them in the Old Testament, and most importantly of all, Jesus teaches them that God has good news to be proclaimed to all humanity in every nation: that Jesus is the Savior: the sacrifice that takes away sin, that cures death, and that defeats the devil.  The disciples are not merely going to pass an exam, nor even get to be teachers themselves – rather they are going to change the entire world forever by being God’s messengers, sent out by Jesus into all the world.  And as history has borne out, they did it.  Jesus did it.

Jesus has been telling them that He would be going away, and that the Holy Spirit would be sent to them.  And as Jesus gets closer to the cross, He is teaching them less and less in parables, and being more blunt about who He is and what is going to happen to Him in Jerusalem.

“His disciples said, ‘Ah, now you are speaking plainly and not using figurative speech!  Now we know that You know all things and do not need anyone to question You; this is why we believe that You came from God.’”

A lot of people are frustrated that the scriptures are full of “figures of speech.”  Some will deny the divinity of Jesus by saying, “Jesus never says, ‘I am God.’”  They say this because they don’t want to believe that He is God.  They imply that if Jesus had said, “I am God” in those exact words, they would believe Him.  But would they?  In one of His “figures of speech,” the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, Jesus points out that “If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced” even if “someone should rise from the dead.”

For anyone can simply say, “I am God.”  And many people did.  Some people say things like this today.  But actions speak louder than words.  Jesus revealed Himself to His closest disciples.  He took them up the Mountain of Transfiguration.  He taught them that He and the Father “are one.”  He preached in the synagogues that He was the Messiah, and cured countless people of illnesses (which the leaders of the people believed was evidence of His being a sorcerer in league with the devil).  Jesus even raised the dead – which is the ultimate demonstration of the Gospel.  And indeed, many times, Jesus used a forbidden figure of speech: “I am,” which was not allowed specifically because that is the divine name of God.

The bottom line is that belief in Jesus is not a choice.  It is simply acknowledging what is true.  But disbelief is a choice, dear friends.  If you don’t want to serve God, you can simply decide not to believe in a Creator.  You can concoct a theory about space aliens seeding our soil with DNA, or that nothing existed until nothingness suddenly became something – the most unscientific faith-based belief in nonsense imaginable.  You can believe that you came from a random series of mutations from a single-celled creature that came from God-knows-where, which the mathematics indicates is simply impossible.  But you can believe all of this if you want to escape the reality of the kingdom.

If you want to serve yourself instead of God, if you want to make your own rules rather than live by nature and the natural law, if you want to write your own story rather than be included in the history that is God interacting with creation, you can pretend, just like a little child acting like a fireman or a princess.  But if you are ready to see the world as it is, you can listen to Jesus teach you about who you are, who He is, and where this is all going.

Believing in the truth – especially when powerful opponents of the truth make you pay a price for believing in it – can be difficult.  Following Jesus is not a path to an easy and carefree life in this fallen world.  There is a cost to being a disciple, even though the cost of being reconciled with God has been paid in full by our Lord at the cross.  Faith is a gift, but holding to that faith will cost you respectability in the eyes of the world – the same world we now call “clown world” in which nobody can tell you what a woman is, a world that celebrates death as a solution to our problems.  We live in a world that tells you that if you have enough money and stuff and hold the right views and serve the right people – you will be happy.  How’s that working out?

But we don’t believe in Jesus because belief makes us feel good.  We believers believe because we are convinced that it is true.  The Holy Spirit has come and convicted our hearts.  We know what we read in the scriptures – such as our Gospel today that was authored by John the apostle, who was there for all of the miracles of Jesus: the same John who describes Jesus repeatedly as God.  “In the beginning,” says John, “was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

Jesus is God, and Jesus is a man who came to our world to save us.  He taught for three years, and demonstrated His power.  He left behind an empty tomb and a church that replaced the Roman Empire, and to this day exists all over the world. 

You can choose to reject Jesus and His gifts.  You can be “empowered” by pretending to be your own god or goddess with New Age meditation and mantras and yoga.  You can choose a religion of the Law that makes you think you can climb your way up to God, such as Judaism or Islam.  You can be really trendy and be a witch or a Luciferian.  So edgy!  You can choose to believe only in atoms and molecules and look down your nose on anyone who believes in non-material things.  You can claim to have special spiritual gifts, that God speaks directly to you, that you are some kind of prophet, or that Jesus speaks to you through some writer who claims that Jesus spoke to her and told her to write His words in a modern book of feel-good claptrap (yeah, the real Jesus doesn’t sound like that).  You can even be really trendy and claim to worship pagan gods and maybe even get permission to wear a beard in the military.  Or you can just believe in self-actualization and self-empowerment and me-time and deciding that you want to enjoy yourself until you die alone surrounded by strangers.  You can decide to believe any, or even all, of those things.  But are they true?  Don’t you know deep inside that those things are nonsense? 

But to be a Christian isn’t a choice, dear friends.  If you believe it, you believe it.  If you hear the scriptures and are transformed by them, then you believe.  If you look at the order in the universe, if you look at the existence of the church, if you look at the evidence from historians of that remarkable time in history where a man walked among us and taught and did things that only God in the flesh can do, and in defiance of the most powerful people on earth, who killed Him, sealed His tomb, and guarded it with soldiers – walked out of His own tomb, leaving behind stunned believers and unbelievers alike who had (and have) no rational explanation for these events – then you will be like the disciples in our Gospel, saying: “Now we know that You know all things and do not need anyone to question You; this is why we believe that You came from God.”

St. John and all the apostles teach us why Jesus came from God, and why God came to us.  This is the Gospel, the good news that the church has for a world that is very sick.  Our “clown world” is not funny.  It is dying.  It is rotting.  It is sad and depressed.  It’s not trendy and glamorous.  Look at the world’s elite “heroes” and ask yourself if that is how you want to live.  The world is looking for good news in the ruins.  It is a make-believe world of antidepressant drugs, made-up religion, rebellion against reality, and the pursuit of happiness in junk.  It is a decaying shell of a world filled with poverty and ignorance and hopelessness – and only Jesus has the answer. 

The only actual good news in this world is the Gospel.  And that is the best news of all, dear brothers and sisters.  And if we look at reality honestly and with open minds, we cannot come to any other conclusion than that Jesus is God, and He has broken into our messed up world to save us by means of His cross and His resurrection.  He has left evidences of it that can only be denied by a stubborn will that wants to control its own destiny and pretend to be something that it isn’t.

But to those of us who believe, those of us who are being saved, we do have not just hope, but “a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf.”

As our Lord says: “Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.”

Amen.

Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Alleluia! 

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.