JOHN THE ELDER’S STORY

1 John 1:1- 2.2

Can you imagine how you would react if, as you were giving Christian witness, trying to tell the good news about Jesus the risen Lord, you heard other stories about Jesus that didn’t sound quite right, but they were told so convincingly that people were believing it? Certainly you know, for example, that there are groups of Christians who say there is no true baptism without total immersion baptism a belief that mixes the Greek mythology story of Achilles in with the gospel stories of Jesus’ baptism. There is no Biblical mandate for a full immersion; nowhere does Jesus say it or is it recorded by others. Jesus was in the Jordan River and was baptized by John “with a baptism of repentance.” That’s just one example; here’s another: Some churches claim there is no baptism unless you have a Holy Ghost baptism and have a manifestation of the Spirit, (such as speaking in tongues). But in the Bible there is no requirement that that process to takes place for a true baptism. What we can deduce from Matthew 28 and from the other baptism stories in the gospels is that Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River and that, like the purification pools called Mikvahs outside of the Temple in his day, Jesus wanted an outward purification symbol for an inward cleansing of one’s heart by those who called him as Lord. Did you also know that some churches say that if you haven’t been baptized in their branch of Christianity, then you are not baptized? Again, some ministers and denominations build barriers between congregations instead of bridges.

A long time ago, there was a man named John. The writer of the Gospel, the letters, and the Revelation may indeed have been the Apostle of Jesus who in humility was referring to himself as the Elder. But he would have been quite an old man at the time of the writing. And was the apostle John a literate enough man to have written all those works? Or could he, like the scribes of other gospels, have told what he saw, knew, and believed to a trusted young man, an early Elder in the church, whose name was also John? Do you know that if you look up the word “elder” in the Greek language in which the New Testament was originally written down, that you find the word “presbuteros,” from which we get the word “Presbyterian” –governed by elders? How does a man from Galilee, a Jewish rural province, learn how to write educated Greek, unless he tells his story to a scribe later on when he moved to Ephesus, and established an early underground outpost for Christianity? Some say John the Apostle moved there between 37 A.D. and 48 A.D. along with Mary, the mother of Jesus, and there he learned the language and began spreading the gospel of his Lord in Asia Minor even before Paul got there. Some say he wrote the Gospels and letters there and later he wrote his Revelation from prison on Patmos Island. We would just be speculating if we claimed one claim was certainly true over another. But what we do know is that during that first century, when people were grappling with the thought of if Jesus were the Christ, and if he rose from the dead, and if he were a man or God or both, that plenty of great orators tried to pull this fledgling religion over to their way of thinking. It is in that context that we find ourselves with the letter of 1 John. The apostle who recorded the amazing story of following Jesus, saw him on the cross, then later saw him appear to the Twelve (literally then, the Eleven) after he had clearly died, and heard him offer for Thomas to touch his hands and side was incensed by the counterfeit Christianities that were trying to win followers. One group, called the Gnostics, from which much ado has been made surrounding the Gospels put out by their writers, were Greeks and Jews who believed they were intellectually elite and had access to higher knowledge of God by which they were saved, not by Jesus’ paying the price for their sins. They believed that the serpent in the Creation stories was a good character because knowledge of good and evil was power; and they believed that Jesus’ death was a good event because it released his divine soul from an evil body. Therefore the one who brought about such a release of Jesus’ soul, Judas, was a hero in Gnostic writings and his suicide also released his own good soul from his evil body. Are you scratching your heads? “Did I hear him right?” you’re asking yourselves? Messes with your thinkin’ doesn’t it? It turns what you believe on its head which is what happens when you listen to other sources as if they were right. At the same time in the first century another group called Docetists said Jesus just “appeared” to be human, but wasn’t really; he was just a holy projection from God. John, the beloved disciple, was incensed by such teachers who were gaining a following. He knew he had seen Jesus, learned from him, been transformed by him, watched him die, and saw Thomas touch him when he came back from death. He was determined to set the record straight. In fact, if it weren’t for the conviction of the three who went up the Mount of Transfiguration with Jesus—Peter, James, and John—the message of Christ might have continued to be twisted by gifted orators and the message that the disciples knew might have been covered with layers of lies. Look how John, the transformed but rugged disciple, reverts to his gentle voice to get his point across, even though he is likely seething in his heart. He takes the prologue of his own Gospel and tells it again in similar language. “We declare to you what was from the beginning, ( In the beginning was the Word), what we have heard and seen with our eyes, (I and the others were eyewitnesses of these things) what we have looked at and touched with our hands (like a doubter from the Show-Me State) concerning the word of life (Jesus) this life was revealed (I saw him with my eyes and opened my heart to him); “we have seen it and testify to it and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us. … God is light; in him there is no darkness…. If we say we know the light but don’t, we are actually in darkness; but if we walk in the light as he himself was in the light, Christ cleanses us from all sin.” Look at that: here John tells us how our sins are forgiven: acknowledging sin, confessing sin, and believe in Christ as light and Lord. Nothing is said about the mode of baptism or about knowing more than someone else about Jesus; only that by his blood, we are healed. He calls his readers “little children,” a term implying a need to trust, a need to believe in, a need to depend on one such as a dependable parent or teacher or pastor. Gently, without the fire of a Jonathan Edwards or coercion of a David Koresh, John works to build their trust and teach them about his Lord: who he was, what he did, and what he said. John was most qualified for that; and I find him most engaging, feeding me information as if over a table of trust.

So today, remember that you will encounter many attractive, well-spoken, charismatic, or persuasive religious people on any given week. They are broadcast over the airwaves, they use free tickets to Christmas pageants and passion plays to get a captive audience, and they invite youth to rallies with a bait with fun and switch with coercion conversions that can become downright threatening. They are all around you, trying to get you to believe the way they believe. Some say they are Christians; some invite people to experience their own path of enlightenment. Decide who you trust; ask questions that will help; pray; study; and read Scripture for yourself. A man in the first century who called himself a “presbyter” in the second and third letters of John helped secure a right understanding of Jesus that has lasted until this day. But you have to read his letters and study his gospel. A devotional book based on the great hymns of the church references First John as a Scriptural letter that anchors flitting faith; the hymn that goes with it has a refrain that goes like this: “On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand; all other ground is sinking sand.” Amen.

Jeffrey A. Sumner April 23, 2006