John: Who is this Man?

We last saw the Lord Jesus in the Gospel of John in Samaria, where he had that amazing encounter with the woman at the well which eventuated in a great spiritual awakening in that area. The Lord and the disciples were excited and rejoicing over what must have been, even for them, an unexpected spiritual harvest.

I picked up the latest issue of Time Magazine last week and found that the entire issue was devoted to a celebration of Time 's sixtieth year in publishing. The theme of the magazine was, The most amazing sixty years in history. It was a review of many events of the past sixty years, a highly biased one, which centered around Time's own existence. Even for such dramatic years as the past sixty, I thought that claim was rather ludicrous. It reminded me of the man who said to me last week that his tie was the greatest thing since peanut butter! I regarded both claims as having about equal validity.

In three verses in the fifth chapter of the gospel of John we have Jesus' own explanation for that incredible life which he lived among us. Studying through this passage this past week I felt like a little boy who was given a bucket and told to empty the Pacific Ocean before lunch! I have sat and stared at these verses and seen things in them that made me wonder how I could make clear the beauty, the profundity, and yet the simplicity of them.

In the fifth chapter of John's gospel we have been watching Jesus at the pool of Bethesda with a great multitude of blind, lame and paralyzed people. I have already drawn the spiritual parallel to that of a congregation on Sunday morning. There are many blind people present among us, people who cannot see where they are headed, who are stumbling on into disaster and they do not even know it. There are lame people here, those who cannot walk as they ought to. They know how, but they cannot seem to make themselves do it; instead they stumble, falter, and fall. There are paralyzed people here who want to do more than they are doing, but their wills seem to be in a grip they cannot break. They find themselves returning again and again to habits of thought and attitudes of mind which they know are wrong and hurtful.

In the fifth chapter of John's gospel Jesus makes amazing claims about himself. He claims to be "the Son of God," "the One sent by the Father," "the Source of all life" (physical and spiritual), "the Judge of all the world" (all history is heading toward a confrontation with him), and "the Raiser of the dead," the One who one day will empty all the cemeteries of the earth.

It is no coincidence in God's program I am sure, that this Sunday which has been set aside as World Food Day is also the day we come to the account in John's gospel of Jesus feeding the 5,000 beside the Sea of Galilee.

I have been listening to some of the commentators review the past year and almost all of them were negative on 1983. They felt it was a bad year for the United States and for the world in general. Certainly all will agree that international tensions were much higher at the end of the year than they were at the beginning. The nuclear threat grows as each day passes. Moral darkness deepens on every side. There are not many encouraging signs in what we see happening around us.

The sixth chapter of the Gospel of John is the setting for one of the great discourses of our Lord, his word on the "bread of life." Bread, of course, is the symbol for that which sustains and maintains life.

When Jesus announced to the crowd at the synagogue at Capernaum that he was the "bread which had come down from heaven," they must have been very startled by his remarkable claim. But it is no wonder they were puzzled by what he said.

We have come to that point in John's gospel where many of Jesus' disciples drew back and no longer followed him. This is a turning point in our Lord's ministry, where he confronts the twelve with the question, "Will you also go away?" This is a frequent phenomenon in our day also. Many people start out the Christian life and seem to do very well for awhile, but then they drop out of sight and nobody seems to know what happened to them.