Sermon Audio
The Fifteenth Sunday After Trinity
Now Come the Greeks
St. John 12:32-50
In the system of the synagogue, 24 specific offenses could generate excommunication. Among them were taking the Lord’s name in vain and keeping a fierce dog. The penalty was imposed in three stages.
The accused was summoned before the court. If he would not appear or if he refused to make amends he received a 30-day sentence. He was banned from the communal baths, table fellowship and the use of the razor.
His access to the usual society of his fellow Jews and to the temple was curtailed. This penalty could be imposed for a second 30-day period and then a third if the offender was unrepentant.
If he remained obstinate at this point, the second stage was invoked. A court of 10 men pronounced a solemn malediction, or curse, upon him, cutting him off from most of the religious and social life of the community. When necessary, in the third stage he was cut off entirely from the congregation.
This last phase was even more drastic than it sounds. He probably derived his livelihood from participation in the community.
The law of Moses did not institute this system. It arose organically, flowing out of the community’s need to protect itself from heretics and those who engaged in flagrant immorality.
We have encountered it already in John’s gospel, in chapter 9, where Jesus heals a blind man.
In the aftermath, his parents refuse to identify Jesus as the One who performed the healing. We read:
“His parents said these things because they feared the Jews, for the Jews had agreed already that if anyone confessed that He was Christ, he would be put out of the synagogue” (v. 22).
Our Lord may have referred specifically to this three-tiered system. We read His words in Luke 6(:22):
“Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you, and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of Man's sake.”
Now that the long-awaited Messiah has arrived, how will God’s covenant people respond to Him? Will they make belief in Him a condition of continuing in the community?
(Read text.)
Events now begin to move at a crackling pace. Since we left Jesus in Bethany at the resurrection of Lazarus, the ruling council has hatched its plot to kill Him, Mary has anointed His feet with expensive ointment, the chief priests have conspired to kill Lazarus to dispose of the evidence of his resurrection and Jesus has made His triumphal entry into Jerusalem.
The resurrection of Lazarus, understandably, has created a stir. Recall that Bethany is virtually a suburb of Jerusalem. Some who witnessed the raising of Lazarus are now following Jesus and others, who have received the news in the capital, are coming out to meet Him.
The authorities’ concern is not without foundation. In this climate, with a word, Jesus could quite easily launch a revolution on the spot, and then the full weight of the Roman colossus would come crashing down on the Jews.
They both fear and hate the Romans and the mixing of fear and hatred makes for a volatile cocktail; Israel’s leaders are guzzling it like hobos passing a bottle of Thunderbird.
The pot is about to boil over . . . but, first, there has been a sea change we must not miss.
In the familiar story of the triumphal entry we note that Greeks are present. The term here refers not strictly to native Greeks but to non-Jews from around the Greek-speaking world . . . to gentiles.
The first phase of the Lord’s mission – to the Jews – has come to the end. We’re treated to a tasty piece of Johannine irony here. The Pharisees mutter darkly to one another, “Look, the world has gone after Him.”
They are saying simply that Jesus has attracted a large following, but the author knows as we know that the Lord’s mission is to the world. From this point forward, the scope broadens until finally we see Him dying and rising from His own tomb for the sake of those from every nation, people, tongue and tribe who put their trust in Him.
We also find one last case of messianic misunderstanding. Jesus says, “And I, if I am lifted up, will draw all peoples to Myself.” John adds that He was “signifying by what death He would die.” His hearers have an inkling that He is referring to His crucifixion but, as we have seen so often, their understanding is only partial.
Is not Messiah eternal? So He is, but He must die before He lives forever.
And so we arrive at the condemnation of the Jews for their unbelief. Many, even among the leaders, have placed their faith in Him . . . but many more refuse to see in Him their long-promised Messiah, the Christ.
From here until His trial and crucifixion, Jesus devotes His time and attention to His disciples. That vast majority of Jews have disqualified themselves from His company by their refusal to believe. The Lord has by now performed all of the miracles John chronicles in his gospel and most still wag their heads at Him.
In his telling of the gospel story, John often raises and even intertwines Old Testament themes without referring to their origins. He harks back here to the generation of the Exodus, and their refusal to believe in Yahweh despite the miracles His prophet Moses performs.
From Deuteronomy 29:(2-4): “Now Moses called all Israel and said to them: ‘You have seen all that the LORD did before your eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land -- the great trials which your eyes have seen, the signs, and those great wonders. Yet the LORD has not given you a heart to perceive and eyes to see and ears to hear, to this very day.’”
We know, of course, that faith grounded in signs and wonders, faith that never looks behind them to recognize the deity of the One who performs them, is the faith of spiritual babes . . . but when held up against no faith at all it has much to commend it. The scoffers cannot muster even this much trust in the Lord of all creation.
This widespread refusal to believe did great damage in the moment . . . but its malignant effect is not contained in the moment. Why did so few of the Jews believe even after the resurrection? They looked back to Israel’s rejection of Jesus at this time and reasoned that if so many of the very people to whom Messiah had been promised would not receive Him, He must certainly have been a pretender.
Unbelief is rebellion, and it poisons the well from which not only the present generation drinks but the next and the next as well. I look back on my own profligate early life and find no trouble at all in tracing its corrosive effects forward.
But God is gracious. I have seen some of those nearest and dearest to me turn from the path of rack and ruin to take up the way of righteousness.
Once again we find the tension between God’s sovereign will – His proclamation through Isaiah that “He has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts” – and culpable human will – “they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God.”
All the while, many did believe, even among the rulers. John may be thinking of Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathaea and others, men who looked at Jesus and saw Truth yet kept their own counsel for fear of losing status and privilege.
Here is our answer. It is those who place their faith in Messiah who tremble at the prospect of excommunication. Rather than shout from the rooftops that He has finally appeared they cower in the corner and bridle their tongues.
The leaders should have wielded the sword of excommunication against those who despised the Christ; instead they held it over the heads of those who believed in Him.
The world is flipped on its head. For what do we see today? The creation – a majority of those who inhabit it – hates its Creator.
We who expect to spend eternity with God in His kingdom too often shrink back from confessing our Savior for fear of the bad opinion of men who are bound for hell. We prize the opinion of men more highly than that of God.
And might they not, at the sound of a word fitly spoken, change their course? You and I did.
To value the esteem of men more highly than that of God is to allow the world to blind us. The creation, like Jesus’ miracles, is given to reveal the God standing behind it. When we train our focus on those things bound by time and space we fail to see the One who is infinite and eternal.
Men can be evil or weak or merely confused. God will never mislead you. Curry favor with Him.
Two thousand years later, we’re not likely to resolve that God-given tension between His sovereignty and our responsibility this morning. Suffice it to say two things.
The first is that neither in John nor in any other New Testament writer does divine sovereignty obliterate human responsibility. Somehow, even as He directs the course of events we remain responsible for our choices.
The second is that the evangelist raises the matter here because he would have us know that Israel’s rejection of her Savior does not foil the Father’s will. It had been baked into His plan from the beginning.
And, two thousand years later, we should not discard the perspective of time. Writing on this passage, John Calvin noted that it is significant that in a time of rampant madness some kept their wits about them, calling it, “a remarkable example indeed of God’s grace; for when ungodliness has once gained the upper hand, it is a sort of universal pestilence which infects every part of the body . . .
Calvin goes on: “In today’s world we have the same grace of God. Although ungodliness and contempt for God are everywhere, and many people strive furiously to exterminate the Gospel’s teaching altogether, it always finds some places of retreat, so the faith has, as it were, its havens that it may not be banished completely from the world.”
Beloved in the Lord, two weeks ago I preached on the gathering storm in post-Christian America and our mandate to resist as did the Hebrew midwives of Moses’ day, Daniel and his friends at the Babylonian court and Peter and John when the Jerusalem authorities commanded them to disobey the Lord. I do not recant one word of what I said.
The road before us looks treacherous indeed, but we can take heart. We and our children will not be the first to travel it. In Jesus’ time on earth – the first century – in Calvin’s day – the 16th century – contempt for God and His people was rampant upon the earth.
The faithful remnant endured in those days and it will endure in ours. As we fight the battles we must never lose sight of the final victory that is already ours, claimed for us by our Lord on His cross those two millennia ago. The long view is the true view.
There’s another lesson in this for us as well. We are campaigning – against much of the church of our day – for the cause of orthodox religion.
As heresy sweeps through the mainline churches and seeps into the evangelical churches, we preach and teach the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3).
There is no place in Christendom I would rather stand. I think of the words attributed to Martin Luther when he was hauled before the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to defend his teaching and writings:
“I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen.”
But in setting ourselves up as defenders of orthodoxy we run the risk of sounding like scolds. The age of the hellfire-and-brimstone sermon is behind us, and for the most part that’s a positive development.
Fear is not the best instrument for winning souls to the cause of Christ. And yet . . . here it is in our Lord’s own words:
"He who rejects Me, and does not receive My words, has that which judges him -- the word that I have spoken will judge him in the last day.”
The unredeemed go to hell. It’s that simple, but we must broadcast the gospel in a winsome way, never denying the reality of condemnation but emphasizing the joy of our salvation.
The amazing, merciful, gracious love of God will win souls to Him. We must publish abroad the good news.
When we have won their hearts, their minds will follow.
A further reason to tread carefully as champions of orthodoxy is the danger of becoming too impressed with ourselves. We are sinners saved by grace, nothing less but nothing more.
We have the truth – because we take it straight from Scripture – but truth without humility is a bludgeon. Truth tempered with graciousness is a magnet.
We can and do make errors of interpretation and we must be respectful of the interpretations of others. We must line up with that old theologian who said, “I know I’m wrong about a lot of things; I just don’t know which ones yet.”
And so our orthodoxy is relative – sound, but not perfect.
Our victory, however, is complete and it is final. It is ours in Christ the Conqueror. I came across some lines from an old poem, author unknown:
I saw the conquerors riding by
With cruel lips and faces wan:
Musing on kingdoms sacked and burned
There rode the Mongol Genghis Khan;
And Alexander, like a god,
Who sought to weld the world in one:
And Caesar with his laurel wreath;
And like a thing from Hell the Hun;
And, leading like a star, the van,
Heedless of upstretched arm and groan,
Inscrutable Napoleon went,
Dreaming of Empire, and alone . . .
Then all they perished from the earth,
As fleeting shadows from a glass,
And, conquering, down the centuries,
Came Christ the swordless on an ass.
Amen.
Now Come the Greeks
St. John 12:32-50
In the system of the synagogue, 24 specific offenses could generate excommunication. Among them were taking the Lord’s name in vain and keeping a fierce dog. The penalty was imposed in three stages.
The accused was summoned before the court. If he would not appear or if he refused to make amends he received a 30-day sentence. He was banned from the communal baths, table fellowship and the use of the razor.
His access to the usual society of his fellow Jews and to the temple was curtailed. This penalty could be imposed for a second 30-day period and then a third if the offender was unrepentant.
If he remained obstinate at this point, the second stage was invoked. A court of 10 men pronounced a solemn malediction, or curse, upon him, cutting him off from most of the religious and social life of the community. When necessary, in the third stage he was cut off entirely from the congregation.
This last phase was even more drastic than it sounds. He probably derived his livelihood from participation in the community.
The law of Moses did not institute this system. It arose organically, flowing out of the community’s need to protect itself from heretics and those who engaged in flagrant immorality.
We have encountered it already in John’s gospel, in chapter 9, where Jesus heals a blind man.
In the aftermath, his parents refuse to identify Jesus as the One who performed the healing. We read:
“His parents said these things because they feared the Jews, for the Jews had agreed already that if anyone confessed that He was Christ, he would be put out of the synagogue” (v. 22).
Our Lord may have referred specifically to this three-tiered system. We read His words in Luke 6(:22):
“Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you, and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of Man's sake.”
Now that the long-awaited Messiah has arrived, how will God’s covenant people respond to Him? Will they make belief in Him a condition of continuing in the community?
(Read text.)
Events now begin to move at a crackling pace. Since we left Jesus in Bethany at the resurrection of Lazarus, the ruling council has hatched its plot to kill Him, Mary has anointed His feet with expensive ointment, the chief priests have conspired to kill Lazarus to dispose of the evidence of his resurrection and Jesus has made His triumphal entry into Jerusalem.
The resurrection of Lazarus, understandably, has created a stir. Recall that Bethany is virtually a suburb of Jerusalem. Some who witnessed the raising of Lazarus are now following Jesus and others, who have received the news in the capital, are coming out to meet Him.
The authorities’ concern is not without foundation. In this climate, with a word, Jesus could quite easily launch a revolution on the spot, and then the full weight of the Roman colossus would come crashing down on the Jews.
They both fear and hate the Romans and the mixing of fear and hatred makes for a volatile cocktail; Israel’s leaders are guzzling it like hobos passing a bottle of Thunderbird.
The pot is about to boil over . . . but, first, there has been a sea change we must not miss.
In the familiar story of the triumphal entry we note that Greeks are present. The term here refers not strictly to native Greeks but to non-Jews from around the Greek-speaking world . . . to gentiles.
The first phase of the Lord’s mission – to the Jews – has come to the end. We’re treated to a tasty piece of Johannine irony here. The Pharisees mutter darkly to one another, “Look, the world has gone after Him.”
They are saying simply that Jesus has attracted a large following, but the author knows as we know that the Lord’s mission is to the world. From this point forward, the scope broadens until finally we see Him dying and rising from His own tomb for the sake of those from every nation, people, tongue and tribe who put their trust in Him.
We also find one last case of messianic misunderstanding. Jesus says, “And I, if I am lifted up, will draw all peoples to Myself.” John adds that He was “signifying by what death He would die.” His hearers have an inkling that He is referring to His crucifixion but, as we have seen so often, their understanding is only partial.
Is not Messiah eternal? So He is, but He must die before He lives forever.
And so we arrive at the condemnation of the Jews for their unbelief. Many, even among the leaders, have placed their faith in Him . . . but many more refuse to see in Him their long-promised Messiah, the Christ.
From here until His trial and crucifixion, Jesus devotes His time and attention to His disciples. That vast majority of Jews have disqualified themselves from His company by their refusal to believe. The Lord has by now performed all of the miracles John chronicles in his gospel and most still wag their heads at Him.
In his telling of the gospel story, John often raises and even intertwines Old Testament themes without referring to their origins. He harks back here to the generation of the Exodus, and their refusal to believe in Yahweh despite the miracles His prophet Moses performs.
From Deuteronomy 29:(2-4): “Now Moses called all Israel and said to them: ‘You have seen all that the LORD did before your eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land -- the great trials which your eyes have seen, the signs, and those great wonders. Yet the LORD has not given you a heart to perceive and eyes to see and ears to hear, to this very day.’”
We know, of course, that faith grounded in signs and wonders, faith that never looks behind them to recognize the deity of the One who performs them, is the faith of spiritual babes . . . but when held up against no faith at all it has much to commend it. The scoffers cannot muster even this much trust in the Lord of all creation.
This widespread refusal to believe did great damage in the moment . . . but its malignant effect is not contained in the moment. Why did so few of the Jews believe even after the resurrection? They looked back to Israel’s rejection of Jesus at this time and reasoned that if so many of the very people to whom Messiah had been promised would not receive Him, He must certainly have been a pretender.
Unbelief is rebellion, and it poisons the well from which not only the present generation drinks but the next and the next as well. I look back on my own profligate early life and find no trouble at all in tracing its corrosive effects forward.
But God is gracious. I have seen some of those nearest and dearest to me turn from the path of rack and ruin to take up the way of righteousness.
Once again we find the tension between God’s sovereign will – His proclamation through Isaiah that “He has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts” – and culpable human will – “they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God.”
All the while, many did believe, even among the rulers. John may be thinking of Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathaea and others, men who looked at Jesus and saw Truth yet kept their own counsel for fear of losing status and privilege.
Here is our answer. It is those who place their faith in Messiah who tremble at the prospect of excommunication. Rather than shout from the rooftops that He has finally appeared they cower in the corner and bridle their tongues.
The leaders should have wielded the sword of excommunication against those who despised the Christ; instead they held it over the heads of those who believed in Him.
The world is flipped on its head. For what do we see today? The creation – a majority of those who inhabit it – hates its Creator.
We who expect to spend eternity with God in His kingdom too often shrink back from confessing our Savior for fear of the bad opinion of men who are bound for hell. We prize the opinion of men more highly than that of God.
And might they not, at the sound of a word fitly spoken, change their course? You and I did.
To value the esteem of men more highly than that of God is to allow the world to blind us. The creation, like Jesus’ miracles, is given to reveal the God standing behind it. When we train our focus on those things bound by time and space we fail to see the One who is infinite and eternal.
Men can be evil or weak or merely confused. God will never mislead you. Curry favor with Him.
Two thousand years later, we’re not likely to resolve that God-given tension between His sovereignty and our responsibility this morning. Suffice it to say two things.
The first is that neither in John nor in any other New Testament writer does divine sovereignty obliterate human responsibility. Somehow, even as He directs the course of events we remain responsible for our choices.
The second is that the evangelist raises the matter here because he would have us know that Israel’s rejection of her Savior does not foil the Father’s will. It had been baked into His plan from the beginning.
And, two thousand years later, we should not discard the perspective of time. Writing on this passage, John Calvin noted that it is significant that in a time of rampant madness some kept their wits about them, calling it, “a remarkable example indeed of God’s grace; for when ungodliness has once gained the upper hand, it is a sort of universal pestilence which infects every part of the body . . .
Calvin goes on: “In today’s world we have the same grace of God. Although ungodliness and contempt for God are everywhere, and many people strive furiously to exterminate the Gospel’s teaching altogether, it always finds some places of retreat, so the faith has, as it were, its havens that it may not be banished completely from the world.”
Beloved in the Lord, two weeks ago I preached on the gathering storm in post-Christian America and our mandate to resist as did the Hebrew midwives of Moses’ day, Daniel and his friends at the Babylonian court and Peter and John when the Jerusalem authorities commanded them to disobey the Lord. I do not recant one word of what I said.
The road before us looks treacherous indeed, but we can take heart. We and our children will not be the first to travel it. In Jesus’ time on earth – the first century – in Calvin’s day – the 16th century – contempt for God and His people was rampant upon the earth.
The faithful remnant endured in those days and it will endure in ours. As we fight the battles we must never lose sight of the final victory that is already ours, claimed for us by our Lord on His cross those two millennia ago. The long view is the true view.
There’s another lesson in this for us as well. We are campaigning – against much of the church of our day – for the cause of orthodox religion.
As heresy sweeps through the mainline churches and seeps into the evangelical churches, we preach and teach the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3).
There is no place in Christendom I would rather stand. I think of the words attributed to Martin Luther when he was hauled before the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to defend his teaching and writings:
“I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen.”
But in setting ourselves up as defenders of orthodoxy we run the risk of sounding like scolds. The age of the hellfire-and-brimstone sermon is behind us, and for the most part that’s a positive development.
Fear is not the best instrument for winning souls to the cause of Christ. And yet . . . here it is in our Lord’s own words:
"He who rejects Me, and does not receive My words, has that which judges him -- the word that I have spoken will judge him in the last day.”
The unredeemed go to hell. It’s that simple, but we must broadcast the gospel in a winsome way, never denying the reality of condemnation but emphasizing the joy of our salvation.
The amazing, merciful, gracious love of God will win souls to Him. We must publish abroad the good news.
When we have won their hearts, their minds will follow.
A further reason to tread carefully as champions of orthodoxy is the danger of becoming too impressed with ourselves. We are sinners saved by grace, nothing less but nothing more.
We have the truth – because we take it straight from Scripture – but truth without humility is a bludgeon. Truth tempered with graciousness is a magnet.
We can and do make errors of interpretation and we must be respectful of the interpretations of others. We must line up with that old theologian who said, “I know I’m wrong about a lot of things; I just don’t know which ones yet.”
And so our orthodoxy is relative – sound, but not perfect.
Our victory, however, is complete and it is final. It is ours in Christ the Conqueror. I came across some lines from an old poem, author unknown:
I saw the conquerors riding by
With cruel lips and faces wan:
Musing on kingdoms sacked and burned
There rode the Mongol Genghis Khan;
And Alexander, like a god,
Who sought to weld the world in one:
And Caesar with his laurel wreath;
And like a thing from Hell the Hun;
And, leading like a star, the van,
Heedless of upstretched arm and groan,
Inscrutable Napoleon went,
Dreaming of Empire, and alone . . .
Then all they perished from the earth,
As fleeting shadows from a glass,
And, conquering, down the centuries,
Came Christ the swordless on an ass.
Amen.