Radically Dependent, Rebel God: Why we can trust Jesus

John 5:31-47  New International Version (NIV)

³¹ “If I testify about myself, my testimony is not true. ³² There is another who testifies in my favor, and I know that his testimony about me is true.

³³ “You have sent to John and he has testified to the truth. ³⁴ Not that I accept human testimony; but I mention it that you may be saved. ³⁵ John was a lamp that burned and gave light, and you chose for a time to enjoy his light.

³⁶ “I have testimony weightier than that of John. For the works that the Father has given me to finish—the very works that I am doing—testify that the Father has sent me. ³⁷ And the Father who sent me has himself testified concerning me. You have never heard his voice nor seen his form, ³⁸ nor does his word dwell in you, for you do not believe the one he sent. ³⁹ You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, ⁴⁰ yet you refuse to come to me to have life.

⁴¹ “I do not accept glory from human beings, ⁴² but I know you. I know that you do not have the love of God in your hearts. ⁴³ I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not accept me; but if someone else comes in his own name, you will accept him. ⁴⁴ How can you believe since you accept glory from one another but do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?

⁴⁵ “But do not think I will accuse you before the Father. Your accuser is Moses, on whom your hopes are set. ⁴⁶ If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. ⁴⁷ But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?”

It’s hard to carve and eat a whole chicken well. There are so many places where an exact cut is needed and, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can easily have a big mess on your hands. John chapter 5 is one big chicken – we finally come to the end of it today and I suspect that many of us find our hearts and minds bloated with wonderful truth, challenging demands, and maybe even some boney questions. The juiciest part has been a controversy over a good thing  -  a healing which quickly moves to scandal, persecution and even a desire to kill Jesus. But whether it’s about a miracle, or a controversy – in John it always boils down to the same question, “Who is this guy?” And Jesus’ answer, as I’ve just read, is a bit bewildering. What are we to do with this thoroughly picked through carcass? And then I remembered something my wife taught me about carving a chicken. Two of the best pieces of the chicken are often looked over by people who don’t know about them (they’re on the backside and about the size of your thumb and are probably the juiciest pieces on the whole bird). The French have a funny name for them – Le sot l’y laisse (pronounced: le soh lee less) or “the fool leaves them.” Well, I didn’t want to be a fool and so I sat with this text until I figured out where those pieces were and heard Jesus saying, “Stop managing me but trust me. I don’t care if you think it’s confusing or tedious. I don’t need your glory or any glory for that matter. I only care about what God wants me to do. I only say what God wants me to say. And as God is my witness, I will not be swayed by your praise or adulation, your hatred or your persecution, I will do what God is asking of me so that you may be saved,” vs. 34 (that’s my paraphrase of our passage). 

As God is my witness, Jesus says, my story, my actions, my words are all about God – Jesus constantly claims that his identity and actions are grounded in following God whole heartedly. Vss. 19 and 30 offer some striking statements: Jesus says, “the Son does only what he sees the Father doing” and “I can do nothing on my own.”  Illus. of a kid given authority by a parent – Get up! Dad said that I can get you up.” Kids, like most of us, revel in the power offered by association – for kids being a fascist is fun, Jesus, however, revels not in the power he wields but in his single-minded obedience to God alone.

“Why do you do what you do?,” the Jewish authorities ask. “Because God does these things and I love him and am obedient,” Jesus responds. So Jesus Christological claim - his stated claim about his own identity and relationship to God in John’s Gospel, which is said to have the highest Christology, is grounded in his claim not to be equal with God but to be utterly dependent upon him. 

Jesus’ claim to be One with the Father is not some grandiose claim of his own heroism or self-determination or even power. He is not running around the Galilean hill sides crying, “Look at me! Look at what I can do!” And it’s the Jewish leaders not Jesus who construe his claim of having God as his father as a claim to be equal with God – a reason, by the way, I believe that we get caught up in bad theology whereby we pit the one god against the other  as a contest of wills (OT God vs. NT God, judgment vs. salvation, holiness vs. love, scary vs. nice) or we imagine a humanity-less Jesus who as God has incredible cosmic power at his whim, illus. King Missile’s song, “Jesus was way cool”. Jesus, however, bypasses this word “equal” altogether. Equal is not his word but rather his argument rests on voluntarily renouncing his own independence. He only does what the Father is doing, says only what the Father wants him to say. It’s not works or miracles in and of themselves that are meant to be great, that somehow settle the issue of who Jesus is – Jesus is not some David Copperfield looking to make the Statue of Liberty disappear and his healings so far have done little to make him well-liked or understood – but he points to his utter obedience to God as the true witness of his own identity. 

These people say, “we don’t like what you’re doing” and Jesus says, “I don’t care, take it up with God. He’s the One doing it.” That’s not some cold hearted statement but an admonition of deep love for us – he will save us, be faithful, whether we like him or not. It’s funny that the very thing Jesus is so often praised for – his rebel streak, his going against the grain, his challenging of authority, these things that make him supposedly so edgy, so defiant, is not, according to him, because of a contrary nature. No, his radicalness, his “out-of-the-box” vision of God, holiness, healing, love is because he only does what he is told. When you think of Jesus remember that – He makes God known through his audacious obedience. Your salvation was not at heart daring or heroic manly rescue gained by an army of one it was accomplished by an act of radical submission to a rebel God.

Why does this matter? Why obsess over these few verses of legal argument about testimony and witness? Why should we care about Jesus’ claim of radical obedience? What are the sot l’y laisse?:

               1.      First, it matters because it means that we can trust that Jesus is God incarnate, God with skin, God in action, in love, at work in our midst. This is not because Jesus carries God’s genes or chromosomes or wields a magic ring but because he is obedient to God alone. And what does he do with this argument – make himself a king, gather great wealth and acquire political clout? No, he becomes a servant and accepts death on a cross. It means that God can be trusted because we have before us his agenda and purpose in Jesus Christ. It means that God is not out to get us and that we can dispense with a great deal of bad religion that hides behind God’s supposedly hidden agenda, his mysterious ways (a phrase always used when something terribly shocking happens), or the vast gulf that supposedly separates God from us. It means what Trinitarian theology has tried all along to say, “All who God is, is faithful, offering salvation to us.” It doesn’t mean that all mysteries are solved but that because of Jesus we can now understand what God has wanted for us all along – life to the fullest, John tells us.

               2.      These verses matter because they have everything to do with how we read our Bible. According to Jesus, the whole Bible is to read and understood as pointing to, and finding its place in, the story that Jesus is Lord. Jesus obeys and reveals that Yahweh from the OT, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of the prophets and the creator of all that is. It reminds us that above any moral reading, the Bible is fundamentally the story of the God who gives life. And that lens should shape how we read the story – we have to read the story in a sense backwards knowing who God is in Christ. In contrast, if we read without this center we may not find life (see John 5:39). The Apostle Paul recognized this reality in Romans chapter 7. He states, “the very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me.” Believing the scriptures offer eternal life on their own, by way of the children sermon, is to believe that if I eat the magazine advertisement for Ben & Jerry’s it will taste like ice cream. This does not mean that you shouldn’t study your Bibles, read them regularly and even passionately – you should and can with full confidence that Jesus can be found therein. You cannot love your Bible too much but you must remember that loving your Bible is not the same thing as loving or trusting Jesus – the Pharisees and teachers of the law are proof of this. One final illustration to make the point: Talking to a fellow deaf seminary student through an interpreter. She had to keep telling me. “Don’t look at me, the interpreter said, "I’m not the one speaking. Look at him. He’s the one who’s speaking.”

As you read your Bible – always remember to look at him, for he read it and lived it faithfully before God, he is, John says, the Word.