This shows up clearly in the Bible, which narrates the life of Jesus Christ four different times, from four slightly different perspectives. The life of Christ is good news, so these biographies are called “gospels,” or the Greek word for “good news.” Three of those gospel biographies, written by Matthew, Mark, and Luke, tell the story in a relatively similar way. Because they “see” the story from a similar angle, scholars have called them the “synoptic” gospels, from the Greek words for “see” (optic) and “with” or “together” (syn). John, though, tells the story of Jesus from an adjacent angle. He tells us clearly what the other gospels tell more subtly, pulling back the curtain on the eternal triune life of God and God the Son, incarnate, Jesus Christ. He tells stories the other gospels don’t tell us, like the story of Lazarus. He also tells the same stories as the other gospels, yet in his unique way. This shouldn’t worry us, because John also tells us at the very end of the gospel: “And there are also many other things that Jesus did, which, if every one of them were written down, I suppose not even the world itself could contain the books that would be written” (21:25). 

The four biographies of Jesus give us a full picture of who Jesus actually was and is, and what he came to do. The four storytellers complement each other. For example, John narrates the donkey-ride of King Jesus into Jerusalem in less than half the space of the other three gospels. He also gives us details about the story the others don’t, and he emphasizes certain things because of the audience of his gospel. 

He tells us here the story of the the counter-intuitive glory of the King of the cosmos, the entire universe, Jesus Christ, God the Son, incarnate. Jesus enters Jerusalem as the King and Savior God had promised centuries before, but, despite its appearance, his seemingly royal entry into the city did not ultimately exalt him as King. His royal arrival foreshadowed his true glory, which God would reveal on the cross and vindicate in the resurrection. 

At this point in the gospel, John has slowed the storyline to the pace of a snail, transitioning in chapter 12 from the “book of signs” in chapters 1-11 (a narrative of multiple years) to the “book of glory” in chapters 13-21 (a narrative of merely days). Jesus rides into Jerusalem on the donkey to signal the start of his glorious, royal mission—the royal mission of crucifixion and resurrection. In this story, John invites us in two movements to wake up and see the glory, to realize or remember the glory of Christ the King. 

1. Crown the Long-Promised King (12:12-15)

The next day, when the large crowd that had come to the festival heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, they took palm branches and went out to meet him. They kept shouting: 

“Hosanna! 
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,—the King of Israel!” 

Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, just as it is written: 

"Do not be afraid, 
Daughter Zion. Look, your King is coming, 
sitting on a donkey’s colt. 

The crowds had gathered for the Passover festival, which celebrated the salvation of the Lord. There could have been literally millions of people there (Carson, John, 431). The Lord had delivered his people from Egypt, and the people rejoiced and remembered. As he approaches the festival, Jesus’s fame has once again preceded him. The crowds who had heard about his wonder-working power, already prepared to praise, celebrate him with palm branches. Palm branches would have been easy to find and signaled the worship and celebration of God and his work at the Feast of Tabernacles (Lev. 23:40). Only John notes that the branches were palm branches (Keener, John, 2.868), an interesting point because John also wrote Revelation, which says in Revelation 7:9-10:

After this I looked, and there was a vast multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and language, which no one could number, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were clothed in white robes with palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: 

Salvation belongs to our God, 
who is seated on the throne, 
and to the Lamb!

“From about two centuries earlier, palm branches had already become a national (not to say nationalist) symbol. When Simon the Maccabee drove the Syrian forces out of the Jerusalem citadel he was feted with music and the waving of palm branches (cf. 1 Macc. 13:51, 141BC), which had also been prominent in at the rededication of the temple (2 Macc. 10:7, 164BC)” (Carson, 432). The palm was also used on Judean coins (Carson, 432).

We see the crowds hymning praise from Psalm 118:25-26: Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Psalm 118 is the final Psalm of Hallel, here framing the praise of the Lord, Yahweh, the God of creation and covenant with thanks for his goodness demonstrated in covenantal love (118:1-4, 29). The good Lord loves his people and his unfailing convent love delivers them from death (118:5-7), is better than human deliverers (118:8-9), triumphs over enemies (118:10-18), opens wide the gates of righteousness (118:19-24), placing the rejected stone as the corner of his dwelling (118:22). The Psalmist sets his celebration in the context of the “day of the Lord,” the day of judgment on God’s enemies and salvation for God’s people. In this Psalm, we find the promise of the blessed one who comes in Yahweh’s name. Jesus comes in the name of Yahweh, not merely as a delegate, but as Yahweh himself, the Word who was with Yahweh and was Yahweh (John 1:1). 

The crowds add the phrase “the king of Israel,” confirming what John has already made clear in the narrative on the lips of an early follower of Christ: "'Rabbi,' Nathanael replied, 'You are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel!'” (1:49). 

John notes that Jesus finds a donkey and thus fulfills another messianic prophecy from Zechariah 9:9. This verse follows the word of Yahweh against the enemies of his people (Zech. 9:1-8). In contrast to Yahweh’s judgment of the wicked nations, Israel should not be afraid because as the beloved daughter of the Lord, the King will arrive on the colt of a donkey. Some interpret this to mean Jesus entered in humiliation, but the donkey was a sign of royalty in the ancient world. One writer called the donkey “the ‘Mercedes-Benz’ of the biblical world’” (Kenneth Way, Donkeys in the Biblical World, 87 in Klink, John, 538). He is the king who brings peace, as the next verse in Zechariah says, but peace purchased through triumphant judgment (Klink, John, 538):

“I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim 
and the horse from Jerusalem. 
The bow of war will be removed, 
and he will proclaim peace to the nations. 
His dominion will extend from sea to sea, 
from the Euphrates River 
to the ends of the earth.” (Zechariah 9:10)

Like we said, John tells this story in less half the space of the other gospels, revealing the triumphant entry of the long-promised King. But John contributes uniquely the second half of this section, which calls us to wake up and see the glory. 

2. Wake Up and See the Glory (12:16-19)

His disciples did not understand these things at first. However, when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written about him and that they had done these things to him. Meanwhile, the crowd, which had been with him when he called Lazarus out of the tomb and raised him from the dead, continued to testify. This is also why the crowd met him, because they heard he had done this sign. Then the Pharisees said to one another, “You see? You’ve accomplished nothing. Look, the world has gone after him!”

Maybe it was the busyness, or the general celebratory air of the festival. Maybe they had seen crowds celebrate Jesus before. But the disciples didn’t understand the significance of the moment in the moment. The failed again “to comprehend the nature of Jesus’ kingship” (Carson, John, 434)—a crucified kingship. They witnessed here the emerging glory of the conquering King. They saw God fulfilled his prophetic testimony in real time. But only afterward, “when Jesus was glorified.” In John’s story, the moment of the glory of Christ arrived at the moment of the crucifixion of Christ. “Jesus replied to them, ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified’” (12:23). The purposes of God often work this way: inside-out, upside-down, backward-forward. Christ radiates his eternal glory in his excruciating pain. The cross revealed his glory, and the resurrection vindicated that glory. 

John also explains, unique among the gospel biographers, that the crowd fanning the palms of praise had gathered because of the resurrection of Lazarus. The sixth sign signals the start of the seventh sign, the completion of the signs, the prime miracle of the wonder-working power of God, when Christ would cry, “It is finished” (19:30).  John the storyteller reflected on this story for decades (remember, he wrote this gospel biography 50 or 60 years after he had walked with Jesus on those dusty roads). He had read the other three gospels, probably many times. He saw the story in the light of the glory of the crucifixion and resurrection. When the crowds chanted their praise to the one coming in Yahweh’s name as “the king of Israel,’ John knew that Jesus was revealed as King on the cross (19:19). The King trundled into town on the donkey under the shadow of the cross and toward the light of the emptied tomb. 

The Pharisees fret, for their plot, they think, has been foiled. They don’t realize, yet, how fickle the crowds will be. For now, all they can see is the momentum of the Jesus movement. “The world has gone after him!” Like Caiaphas, they spoke more truly than they knew, foretelling the unlikely but inevitable every-nation-tribe-and-tongue church Christ will gather throughout time and at the end of time.

• • • 

Eppie Lederer wrote newspaper columns for nearly 50 years. In outlets across the nation under the pen name Ann Landers she offered advice to people on a range of issues. One of her favored expressions was, “Wake up and smell the coffee.” This charge evokes shuffling to the kitchen on a dark, early morning, hair matted up to one side, eyes squinting partially closed. You set the brewer and hear the comforting sound of the churl of heating and dripping water. You pour your cup and hold it up to your nose, ready for that magical energizing brew to charge your depleted reserves and alert you to the day ahead. “Wake up and smell the coffee” means “Pay attention to what’s right in front of you. Get real. Look around. Return to reality.” 

The crowds and disciples didn’t know just how glorious Christ was and is. His glorious kingdom was not a small strip of land on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. His glorious kingdom wasn’t the sprawl of the empire centered on the Italian peninsula in Rome. His kingdom is a cosmic Kingdom, which he left in heaven to bring to earth. 

Augustine said, “The Son of God is equal to the Father, he is the Word through whom all things were made; the fact that he wanted to be king of Israel is a condescension, not an advancement. It is an indication of pity, not an increase in power. For he who was called king of the Jews on earth is the Lord of angels in heaven” 

Do you see his glory?

When I was in college, a Christian song came out by Steven Curtis Chapman called, “See the Glory.” That song resonates with me to this day: 

When it comes to the grace of God 
Sometimes its like  
I'm playing Gameboy standing in
the middle of the Grand Canyon 
I'm eating candy sittin at a gourmet feast 
I'm wading in a puddle when I
could be swimming in the ocean 
Tell me whats the deal with me  
Wake up and see the glory 

Here Chapman draws from the essay by C.S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”: 

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

Maybe we could say it this way: it’s like hanging out at Disney Springs (which is basically a glorified mall), when you have an all access pass to every park at Walt Disney World. 

Wake up and see the glory!

Often someone will come up after a funeral and give a little encouraging word: “Nice service.” Or, “Good job. Nice sermon.” Occasionally, someone will whisper a critical word, but no one has ever complained to me after a funeral, “It’s your fault Hilda’s dead.” And no one has ever said, “It would have been nice if you had raised John from the casket.”

Because I’m just a man, I generally can’t heal people or resurrect them, and dead people stay dead. It has always been that way. It has been that way at every funeral I’ve ever performed and at every funeral anyone has performed.

Except for funerals where Jesus showed up. Jesus loved to crash funerals.

Jesus interrupted the planning for his own funeral. After he had been crucified him on Friday, they wrapped his corpse in burial cloth and put him a cave, rolling a stone to cover the entrance. On Saturday he was dead, but on Sunday he defeated death. He rose from the dead.

And it wasn’t the first time he had crashed a funeral. He had foreshadowed his own resurrection and demonstrated his power of resurrection and raising the dead before. In four ways, through four witnesses (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), the Bible tells us the story of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Each one witnesses to a story of Jesus resurrecting the dead. Matthew and Mark share how Jesus raised the daughter of a religious leader named Jairus (Matthew 5:18-26; Mark 5:21-43). Luke tells the time Jesus interrupted a funeral procession and resurrected the son of a widow-woman in the village of Nain (Luke 7:11-17). 

In John's gospel, as the story transitions to the “book of glory” (chapters 12-21), John tells the most profound story of them all in John 11:1-44, culminating the “book of signs” (chapters 1-11) with this great, “climactic sign of Jesus’ ministry.” 

This is one of the most beautiful stories in the Bible. We could squeeze from it countless sermons and studies and chapters and books. Here I want to step into the big picture so that we can see the purpose of Jesus, the person of Jesus, and the promise of Jesus. 

The story starts with Jesus hearing about a dear friend being sick: Now a man was sick, Lazarus from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair, and it was her brother Lazarus who was sick. So the sisters sent a message to him: “Lord, the one you love is sick.” (11:1-3). 

At the very outset of the narrative Jesus explains the purpose of the story: “This sickness will not end in death but is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” (11:4). That phrase “so that” is a single Greek word indicating purpose. Jesus has a purpose in this sickness: glory. The sickness will not end in death. Death is the not the destination, but there will be a layover in death. As the story unfolds, so unfolds the worst case scenario for Jesus’ friends: Lazarus dies. The end result will be the demonstration of who God is and who Jesus his Son is. This is an astounding correlation: the glory that is due to God alone is also due to the Son of God, Jesus. 

When John tells the story of Jesus in this gospel, he is obsessed with the glory of Christ. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (1:14). “Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you” (17:1). God shows his glory in many ways, but maybe most surprisingly he shows it in the crucifixion. 

Jesus surprises us, because he waits before traveling to meet his dying friend. Now Jesus loved Martha, her sister, and Lazarus. So when he heard that he was sick, he stayed two more days in the place where he was. Then after that, he said to the disciples, “Let’s go to Judea again.” “Rabbi,” the disciples told him, “just now the Jews tried to stone you, and you’re going there again?” “Aren’t there twelve hours in a day?” Jesus answered. “If anyone walks during the day, he doesn’t stumble, because he sees the light of this world. But if anyone walks during the night, he does stumble, because the light is not in him” (11:5-10). He waits because of love. When the time is right, he moves toward the purpose he intends to fulfill. We must live—walk—while we have light. God gifts us the day—our lives—and we should walk it out with purpose. 

He said this, and then he told them, “Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I’m on my way to wake him up” (11:11). Here, he indicates a second aspect of his purpose. When Jesus says “to wake him up” it is actually the same word of purpose from 11:4. His purpose was never to prevent the death of Lazarus, but to raise Lazarus from the dead. He saw the situation differently than everyone else: “Lazarus was dead to men who were unable to raise him up; for the Lord roused him from the tomb with such ease as you would not rouse a sleeping person from his bed” (Augustine). His disciples misunderstand thinking he means literal sleep—Then the disciples said to him, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will get well” (11:12). But John the storyteller, one of these disciples, tells us: Jesus, however, was speaking about his death, but they thought he was speaking about natural sleep. So Jesus then told them plainly, “Lazarus has died. I’m glad for you that I wasn’t there so that you may believe. But let’s go to him” (11:13–15). Here Jesus explains the third aspect of his purpose: to create faith in the hearts of his followers. 

Jesus intends to raise Lazarus from the dead so that his followers may believe and see and experience the glory of the triune God. Our good and God’s glory are not different goals for Jesus. In fact, the best thing for us is the exact same thing that will demonstrate who God is and who Jesus is. 

The disciples rouse themselves to join him, led by the bravado of Thomas, before he earning his famous nickname, “Doubting”: Then Thomas (called “Twin”) said to his fellow disciples, “Let’s go too so that we may die with him” (11:16). (This hints at the limits of human heroics, as Thomas refuses to believe until he sees Jesus after his resurrection in chapter 20). 

When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days (11:17). The family lived in Bethany, which was near Jerusalem (less than two miles away) (11:18) and Many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them about their brother (11:19). It has been said that there was a folklore belief that the soul hovered above the body for three days until decomposition set in. This would mean that Jesus purposely waited until there was no doubt that it was too late. Why would he do this? Martha beelines outside the village: As soon as Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went to meet him, but Mary remained seated in the house (11:20).  Martha confront Jesus with the force of an accusation: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.” (11:21). She accuses him: “Lord, you should have been here!” (Klink, John, 503).  Here we begin to see what exactly Jesus is doing when he is creating faith in the hearts of those he loves. So often our faith is like Martha’s: it’s too late. We wallow in the past and let shame about our screw-ups, regret about how things could have been, bitterness about what someone did that they should not have done, or didn’t do that they should have done, even bitterness with God. Like that song by The Fray, "You Found Me": 

I found God on the corner of First and Amistad
Where the west was all but won
All alone
Smoking his last cigarette
I said where you been?
He said, ask anything
Where were you
When everything was falling apart?
All my days
Spent by the telephone
That never rang
And all I needed was a call
That never came
From the corner of First and Amistad
Lost and insecure
You found me, you found me
Lying on the floor
Surrounded, surrounded
Why'd you have to wait?
Where were you, where were you?
Just a little late
You found me, you found me
Just a little late

Now, we might not get that raw. We put on a spiritual face. It’s not that we’re faking; we really think that we believe like Martha: “Yet even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.” (11:22). Most of us live our Christian life at just this place. We say and we think that we believe in the present power of Jesus, but we get exposed, like Martha does. We accuse Jesus of failing us. Jesus again here staggers us with his powerful mercy and merciful power. “Your brother will rise again,” Jesus told her. (11:23).

Here the curtain draws back on Martha’s heart, and ours, because she is us and we are her: Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day” (11:24). Throughout the fourth gospel, John compares and contrasts the verbs “know” (Greek: οἶδα) and “believe” (Greek: πιστεύω). Here he exposes the way we can “know” the truth but in such a way that we don’t fully, heartfully believe it. 

Martha knows the past—“You should have been here, Jesus!” She knows that Jesus could have done something for her brother, but that it’s too late now. Martha knows the theoried future—“He will rise on the last day.” She knows that God will do something for her brother in the future, but it’s too soon now. Martha had good theology, and she knew her Bible. She believed in what Daniel 12:2 says: 

“Many who sleep in the dust 
of the earth will awake, 
some to eternal life, 
and some to disgrace and eternal contempt.” 

The faith of Israel was that God would raise all humanity, those who trusted the LORD to eternal life and those who didn’t to eternal judgment. Martha understands this, but she needs just what we need, because she is us and we are her: present faith in the person of Christ. We are Martha. We live in the past and the future. We think, “If only…” If only this had been different. If only…. And we think, Someday, when… We walk in the world of the “if only” of the too late and the “someday, maybe” of the too soon. She misunderstood the true nature of Jesus “for she thought that Christ had less power when he was absent than when he was present. Thus she said, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. Of course, this can be said of a limited and created power, but it should not be said of the infinite and uncreated power which is God, because God is equally related to things both present and absent; indeed, all things are present to him” (Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on John). 

At just this place, Jesus purposes for Martha what he now purposes for us. He calls Martha to encounter him and his word, to believe him in his person and his promise in that present moment. The Spirit invites us into this same place. He calls us to encounter the person of Jesus and the promise of Jesus in the present moment. 

“I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live. Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” (11:25-26)

Here Jesus confronts Martha with the fifth of seven “I am” statements seeded into the storyline of the gospel of John. In this word, he says that resurrection is not an abstract belief about the future, but a living person in the present. Jesus himself embodies the resurrection of all humanity and all creation. The “last day” arrived in the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. When Jesus was crucified, buried, and raised from the dead, he initiated the beginning of the renewal of all creation. He was the promise or down payment that God would indeed make all things new (as we see in Rev 21:4). 

Notice he doesn’t say, “I will be the resurrection and the life.” He says, “I am.” He offers her himself, right there and right then. And he offers us himself right here and right now. He offers us resurrection right here and right now. It isn’t too late or too soon. 

Jesus encounters Martha with the question: “Do you believe this?” You can’t go back into the past and change things. You can’t speed up the future. All you can do is trust Jesus, right here and right now. 

Martha confesses that she does indeed believe: “Yes, Lord,” she told him, “I believe you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who comes into the world” (11:27). 

Having said this, she went back and called her sister Mary, saying in private, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” As soon as Mary heard this, she got up quickly and went to him. Jesus had not yet come into the village but was still in the place where Martha had met him. The Jews who were with her in the house consoling her saw that Mary got up quickly and went out. They followed her, supposing that she was going to the tomb to cry there. As soon as Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and told him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died!” (11:28-32)

In way that startles those familiar with ancient literature by centralizing these female characters (and they say the Bible marginalizes women!), Martha and Mary confront the Lord with their anger, their sorrow and disappointment with him. Yet they make one critical, life-saving move: they move toward Jesus in their darkest moment. They both go to Jesus. Martha meets Jesus, and invites her sister Mary to meet him. Mary moves toward Jesus in the darkness of her heartbreak, and the mourning Jewish friends follow her. 

God is building the platform to display the miracle that will crown the first sequence of the Savior’s story. 

When Jesus saw her crying, and the Jews who had come with her crying, he was deeply moved in his spirit and troubled (11:33). Maybe the best way to translate the word for “deeply moved” here and again in 11:38 is “enraged.” Jesus enters into the suffering with them. Some argue that Jesus rages agains the broken world of death, others that he rages against the unbelief of those who were there. If you flip a coin, it could land on either side, because sin and death have ravaged the world and the people who indwell it, both in body and in soul. Death has stolen the soul from the body of Lazarus and sin has stolen faith from the souls of his friends. 

But Jesus will not let sin and death have glory here. “Where have you put him?” he asked. “Lord,” they told him, “come and see.” Jesus wept. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Couldn’t he who opened the blind man’s eyes also have kept this man from dying?” Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. “Remove the stone,” Jesus said. Martha, the dead man’s sister, told him, “Lord, there is already a stench because he has been dead four days” (11:34-39). 

The murmuring discussion of the Jewish hearers has echoed through the Jewish hearers, some leaning toward Jesus and others away from him. In grief and his rage, Jesus displays his true humanity. He felt the feelings of human sorrow. But he experienced emotion as one fully in control of his mind and heart. Literally, “he (was) troubled in himself.” He was provoked, but he willed to be so. His humanity did not master him, but like God intended for Adam before Adam failed, he mastered his humanity. He controlled his emotion, his emotion did not control him. He felt—oh how deeply he felt!—but he felt only what he should feel, when he should feel it, how he should feel it, to the extent he should feel it.

He foreshadows his own resurrection, demanding that they remove the stone (11:39), and Martha still doesn’t understand: “Lord, there is already a stench because he has been dead four days.” (11:39). There goes Martha again (we are her and she is us), deploying her knowing. Again, the Lord pushes her toward believing in order to know his purpose, his person, and his promise: Jesus said to her, “Didn’t I tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” (11:40). As Augustine taught us so long ago, believing precedes knowing, faith seeks understanding, seeing follows believing. 

And what a sight it will be. 

So they removed the stone. Then Jesus raised his eyes and said, “Father, I thank you that you heard me. I know that you always hear me, but because of the crowd standing here I said this, so that they may believe you sent me.” After he said this, he shouted with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out bound hand and foot with linen strips and with his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unwrap him and let him go” (11:41-44). 

The productivity expert Stephen Covey has famously encouraged an exercise to cultivate a meaningful life: the funeral exercise. The gist is this: imagine your funeral. What would people say about you? What would you want on your headstone in the graveyard? What would you regret? What would you be grateful for? 

Jesus invites us here into a different funeral exercise: he invites us to the funeral of his friend, but he turns that funeral into a festival. And here he invites us recognize that he is crashing our funeral. We walk through a world of soaked with the stench of the fourth-day of death that has settled onto our lives in physical death, rooted in spiritual death, leading to eternal death. We inhabit broken dreams and the metaphorical death of despair and hopeless living, in marriages, careers, and dreams that have died and been buried in the dirt. Jesus invites us to recognize the broken, sinful patterns in our lives that are patterns of death and destruction. He invites us recognize the patterns of knowing without believing, of too-late and too-soon living that misses his offer in the present.  

In a world of stinking death, Jesus invites us into the world of his person, and his promise, a new world wafting with the aroma of life. 

Kids are like this. They can inhabit a story and long to find themselves in the characters. Halloween is a week away, but most kids don’t need an annual excuse to dress up and become a princess, a warrior, or a star quarterback. Kids are like this, but, really, grown-ups are like this too. We might need that annual Halloween excuse, but we too love to inhabit stories and identify ourselves with the characters in those stories.

In this episode of John’s Gospel that I like to call “the book of life,” John displays a cast of characters, and, just in time for Halloween, we can approach these characters with a sort of openness and possibility. The story invites us to become or warns us about becoming one of these figures in relation to Jesus.

Previously in the story: Jesus has just performed the crowing miracle of the “book of signs,” the governing council of Jewish life, the Sanhedrin had deliberated and decided to put Jesus to death (11:53). Thus transitions John’s narrating of the public teaching and miracle-making ministry of Jesus. “Jesus therefore no longer walked openly among the Jews but departed from there to the countryside near the wilderness, to a town called Ephraim, and he stayed there with the disciples” (11:54). While John covers multiple years in the first eleven chapters (and even longer if you include the eternal perspective of the prologue, as Andreas Kostenberger notes), he slows his storyline to a crawl at the end of chapter 11. Here John narrates the last week of the life of Jesus, giving six chapters (13-18) to single evening. Some have called this half of the gospel “the book of glory,” because the passion week culminates in the cross, which is the “hour” of the glory of Christ.

The final week starts with one of dozens of Passovers in Jesus’s life and two specifically in John’s retelling. But here Jesus enters his final Passover, a unique Passover among the thousands celebrated before and since. At this Passover, Jesus will be the Lamb, the Lamb of God who would take the sins of the world away: “Now the Jewish Passover was near, and many went up to Jerusalem from the country to purify themselves before the Passover. They were looking for Jesus and asking one another as they stood in the temple, ‘What do you think? He won’t come to the festival, will he?’ The chief priests and the Pharisees had given orders that if anyone knew where he was, he should report it so that they could arrest him” (11:55-57).

The time had nearly arrived, and Jesus returns to see his friends in the wake of the great miracle. And as I have said, the story invites us to become or warns about becoming one of these figures in relation to Jesus. And, while John sketches five figures for us, he intentionally contrasts two of these, Mary and Judas, in particular. This contrast presents a question to us about deserving.

In your deepest heart, do you believe Jesus deserves all that you have, or that you deserve all that he has? 

This question can trick us, because Jesus so graciously and freely offers and gives us what he has. But our sinful hearts can pervert grace into merit, that Jesus somehow owes us something. This story, though, shows us the proper perspective, inviting us each to find our own story in the characters in this episode.

1. Lazarus

“Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany where Lazarus was, the one Jesus had raised from the dead.” (12:1)

With the stank of fourth-day-death freshly washed from his resurrected body, Lazarus wants one thing: he wants to sit with Jesus. In 12:2 we see he was “reclining at the table with” Jesus, which indicated a meal of “unhurried celebration and freedom” (D.A. Carson) in which the diners relaxed “on thin mats around a low table. Each … leaning on his arm, usually the left; the feet radiat[ing] outward from the table” (Carson). And his mere presence testifies to the miracle-making might of Christ. He reclines at table as the center display in God’s trophy case of grace. Every breath from this former corpse witness to the life-giving power of Christ, and witness to the life not just that Christ gives but the life that Christ is. In an important sense, every Christian is Lazarus, breathing spiritual life instead of their previous spiritual death. Every Christian sits shelved, testifying as a trophy of the regenerating grace of God. Every Christian has experienced the life-giving power of Christ and witnesses to the life that Christ offers and the life that Christ is. Every Christian has a testimony, a story of what God has done and what only God could do. Some Christian lives testify to the grace of God that yanked them from the deeps of a pit they themselves had dug, pits of addiction, evil, crime, and public failure. Other Christian lives testify to the grace of God that fenced them in, protecting them from their own worst inclinations, saving them from those public failures but nevertheless saving them from the just-as-deep pockets of putrid pride or late-night lust. Hear the good news that God the Father sent God the Son to become a human being, to live life without sin, to offer his life as a sacrifice for sin (because the paycheck for sin is death), to be buried, and raised from the dead so that anyone who will turn from their sin and trust in Christ will be forgiven of their sin and given eternal life. As he called Lazarus to come out of the grace, in that gospel message the voice of Jesus calls your spiritually dead self from the grave. Lazarus, come out, and tell your Lazarus story.

2. Martha

"So they gave a dinner for him there; Martha was serving them, and Lazarus was one of those reclining at the table with him." (12:2)

Martha is a doer, active above all things. Martha plans great parties and hosts great dinners. Martha can’t sit still. Work compels her. Luke tells us a bit more about her and her passion to produce results. Martha gets things done. Martha initiates and leads. Our culture elevates Marthas. We love doers who get things done. Historically, Christian teachers have explained that Martha typifies the active life, a life of service an action. We despise dilettantes who fritter away their time. In the words of Teddy Roosevelt: “Do things; be sane; don't fritter away your time; create, act, take a place wherever you are and be somebody; get action.” We all love Marthas, because Marthas make our lives better. I know, because I’m married to a Martha named Laura. Marthas are superheroes, and maybe you’re a Martha. If so, you should work and serve and do what God has called you to do. But be careful, because Martha’s strength also tends to a specific shortcoming.

"While they were traveling, he entered a village, and a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who also sat at the Lord’s feet and was listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks, and she came up and asked, 'Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to serve alone? So tell her to give me a hand.' The Lord answered her, 'Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has made the right choice, and it will not be taken away from her.'” (Luke 10:38-42)

In this passage in Luke, though, Martha’s serving has led to bitterness. Martha finds herself serving alone, while Mary just sits with Jesus, relaxing. In the midst of their acting, making, doing, producing, and accomplishing, Marthas can miss their moments with the Messiah. Their obsession to get stuff done distracts them from the one necessary thing, finding themselves in Christ. Martha, slow down and take some time with Jesus. The lawn or the laundry will wait. Martha, your accomplishments do not define you. Jesus loves you, this you know for the Bible tells you so. Jesus gave his life to save you because he loves you, because you’re you, not because of what you do.

Martha, take a breath, and breathe in the breath of Life, Christ himself.

3. Mary

"Then Mary took a pound of perfume, pure and expensive nard, anointed Jesus’s feet, and wiped his feet with her hair. So the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume." (12:3)

Mary worships like no one is watching (or smelling). She loves Jesus, and she loves what Jesus has done for her. She can’t get herself low enough before him. She can’t spend enough or offer herself enough. She is all in for Christ and wants simply to be with him. Here John the narrator sets up the contrast at the heart of this passage between Mary’s worship and Judas’s thievery. Mary represents the way we should treat Jesus. We just saw in Luke 10 that Jesus says that Mary chooses the one necessary thing, the right choice, which no one can steal from her. Christ offers us life and we receive life in him. He loves us and we love him back, but that order matters. Martha can’t serve her way into salvation any more than Lazarus could have raised himself from his burial slab. We can sit at the feet of Christ, pouring out our best, because Christ is worth it. And all we have he first gave to us. “What do you have that you have not received?” (2 Cor. 4:7). We should see two things here in the extravagance of Mary’s sacrifice.

First, a tendency toward action (like Martha) can pull in tension with a tendency toward contemplation (like Mary). Historically, Christian teachers typified Martha as the active life and typified Mary as the contemplative life. Our culture exalts action but generally holds contemplation in contempt. A life of the mind, a quiet life of prayer and thought, wastes the opportunity to do something worth doing. The story of Mary of Bethany and her sister Martha requires us to question our values. We must reevaluate. We must revalue what Jesus holds up as a character we should imitate. The world and even Christians despise the apparent wastefulness of a life spent at the feet of Jesus. We all tend toward contemplation or action. We all tend toward either thinking or doing. We tend to be either Martha or Mary. As I said, I’m married to a Martha who has a nearly superhuman ability to multitask, act, and accomplish. I tend toward a Mary-like slower pace of the life of thought, reading, writing, and (sometimes) prayer. Now, Laura loves to sit and read, and I enjoy accomplishing tasks, but we tend in certain directions. We must recognize our own bent. Mary must make sure that contemplation does not devolve into sloth and Martha must make sure that action does not evolve into self-righteousness. Marthas can inspire Mary to act and Mary can call Martha to sit. The doers inspire the thinkers toward action and the thinkers inspire the doers toward contemplation.

Second, though, the main point of this story points us toward extravagant, sacrificial worship in response to what Jesus deserves. Mary worships sacrificially, humbly, personally, and obviously. Sacrificially, she pours out an annual salary’s worth of perfume. We’re talking tens of thousands of dollars spent in the space of a finger-snap. Just, gone, with no apparent return on investment. Humbly, she anoints the calloused and leathered feet of a man who walked everywhere he went on paths unpaved, in dust. She recognizes her place in relation to him. She cannot get herself low enough in the presence of the King whose footstool is the cosmos itself, whose beautiful feet bring good news (Is. 52:7). Personally, she uses her hair to spread the sacrifice across Christ’s feet. Her hair is a glory that she uses for scrubbing (1 Cor. 11:15). “The lowering of one’s hair in this could be a sign of extreme gratitude and an expression of humility” (Klink, 526). She approaches as closely and intimately as she could have possibly been. Not at the reach of her arm, but grazing her nose near his heels. Obviously, the fragrance fills the room. Everyone knows what she has done, and to those with the nose and the eyes of faith it was beautiful to smell and to see.

But not to everyone.

4. Judas

"Then one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot (who was about to betray him), said, 'Why wasn’t this perfume sold for three hundred denarii, and given to the poor?' He didn’t say this because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief. He was in charge of the money-bag and would steal part of what was put in it." (12:4-6)

Judas speaks with the indignance of one who protests too much. He calculates what this gift could have be used to accomplish. We could have done something with that money! He rebukes here both Mary and Jesus (Klink, 527). In reality, he blew smoke so that he could screen his greed. He would skim from the money bag, clearly because he believed he needed it or deserved it. Here John makes his point clear: Mary spends all she has because she believes Jesus deserves it while Judas skims from the group because he believes Judas deserves it. This confronts us: do we believe that Jesus deserves all that we have, or do we (even secretly) believe that he owes us something? This confronted me recently during our family dinner for our son Judson’s eighth birthday. He asked if I would grill burgers, and I gladly agreed. The week had been a rainy one, and Laura asked if it would interfere with the grilling. “No,” I said, “Unless it’s just absolutely pouring, it should be fine.”

It had been drizzling for hours, but at just the moment I went out to the grill to put the burgers on, God turned over a bucket from the heavens. Rain and wind poured across the grill, flooding the patio, my shoes and socked included. I had a talk with the Lord, because it made no sense to me. “God, don’t you owe me better weather?” The answer, of course, is “No.” All is grace, and if all is grace, then as much as God gives generously (and he does), he does not owe us anything.

We owe him everything.

Jesus announces his verdict on the situation:

"Jesus answered, 'Leave her alone; she has kept it for the day of my burial. For you always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.'” (12:7-8)

Scholar Craig Keener insightfully observes something here: “She may have intended the anointing as a royal anointing, which fits the following context”—when Jesus enters Jerusalem as the Hosanna’d King (12:12-15). “But,” Keener continues, “Jesus is enthroned king of the Jews on the cross”—“Pilate also had a sign made and put on the cross. It said: Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews” (19:19). The cross exalts Jesus as the crucified King, a King unlike any other, who has life in himself (John 5:26) yields to death. Keener concludes that “a royal anointing is inseparable from an anointing for burial.” The anointing of Jesus as King is the anointing of Jesus as crucified.

He is so worth all that he receives, and the time was short. He soon would go to the cross, and Mary did the the most urgent and the most important thing. When Judas protests for the poor, he disingenuously also misunderstand the nature of the moment. The poor would be there after the events of Holy Week. The poor should be there, with them in the same congregations. Too many congregations too often live like Jesus was lying when he said “you always have the poor with you.” But too often, we have socioeconomically same churches. Middle class churches, working class churches, wealthy churches. But we should have economically diverse churches. Here, as Aquinas said, “we are led to understand the fellowship the rich should have toward the poor" (Commentary on John). 

5. The Crowds and the Priests

"Then a large crowd of the Jews learned he was there. They came not only because of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, the one he had raised from the dead. But the chief priests had decided to kill Lazarus also, because he was the reason many of the Jews were deserting them and believing in Jesus." (12:9-11)

Here we find the fence-sitters and outright enemies, spectators and haters, the crowds and the priests. Some want the spectacle, some want to end Jesus.

And which character are you?

If you opened the package like Judson on his birthday, which character would in the story would you identify with?

Then something changed. He started moving more quickly, dribbling more confidently, shooting more accurately. He pivoted and crossed-over, laying up a reverse off-hand high off the glass. He rebounded his own shot, jumping to catch the ball above the hoop, slamming it through the webbing of the net. 

Something was different than first appearance about this man. His actions betrayed something beyond an old man shuffling through the motions of a pickup game on a city park’s court. 

Something similar plays out in John’s gospel. Jesus looks normal, but his actions betray something different about him. What Jesus does reveals who Jesus is. To set the context: Jesus has just claimed that he and the Father are one. The Jews clearly understood the significance of this claim, just as they had understood it when Jesus called God his Father and thus claimed equality with God (5:18), and after Jesus had claimed the revealed name of Yahweh for himself: “Before Abraham was, I am” (8:58). Then they had gathered stones to execute him and here they do the same: “Again the Jews picked up rocks to stone him” (10:31). 

Jesus had blasphemed the name of God, he had committed treason against the covenant Lord, so they thought. His hearers had judged him, deliberated, and now mobbed together to execute him. Holding the stones, these hearers shift weight onto their back foot, stretch their arms back like a pitcher defending the honor of teammate who had been plunked by the other side. “Remember to aim for his head,” they whisper to each other.

Jesus does not panic. Almost as if he receives their backstretched arms ready to sling stones as an invitation to continue the conversation: Jesus replied, “I have shown you many good works from the Father. For which of these works are you stoning me?” (10:32).

They pause, fingers still curled around the stones, arms still backsprung for holy war. Jesus has confronted them with the silliness of their mobbing hatred with a triple argument: revelation, action, and deity. First, he has shown them. He has revealed to them. He has pulled back the curtain between creature and Creator, between men and God. Second, he has shown them many good works. He has poured out new wine from the waters of ritual purity (John 2:1-12). He has pulled back a royal officer’s son from the edge of death (4:46-54). He has delivered a man disabled for nearly four decades (5:1-8). He has multiplied a boy’s bag lunch into a feeding program for 5,000 men and their hungry families (6:1-15). He has washed a man’s inborn blindness away with his own spit mixed with Judean dust (9:1-41). Like a better Lebron when he came to Miami, Jesus says, “Not one, not two, not three, not four...” unimaginably good works. Works that, third, could have only come from God. Jesus has drawn back the curtain of the theater of divine action in the world so that they could have—should have— glimpsed the glory of God himself. 

“We aren’t stoning you for a good work,” the Jews answered, “but for blasphemy, because you—being a man—make yourself God.” (10:33)

Their thighs and calves tense, holding their weight leaning onto their back feet, arms yet bent at the elbow, stones still ready to fly, their tone betrays their hearts. It should be obvious what they are doing, and why. They are all Jews there, and these were Jews who knew their Bibles: “And tell the Israelites: If anyone curses his God, he will bear the consequences of his sin. Whoever blasphemes the name of the LORD must be put to death; the whole community is to stone him. If he blasphemes the Name, he is to be put to death, whether the resident alien or the native” (Leviticus 24:15–16). They are single-issue stoners. You can do all the amazing things you want, Jesus, but when you claim to be God we have to do what we have to do. They were zealous and jealous for the Name, the singular name of the only true and living God, Yahweh, the God of creation and covenant.

Like I said, they perfectly understood what Jesus claimed when he said that he and the Father are one. 

Jesus slows them down, and mounts his defense in this assembled mob judging and jurying him for a capital crime: Jesus answered them, “Isn’t it written in your law, I said, you are gods?, If he called those whom the word of God came to ‘gods’—and the Scripture cannot be broken—do you say, ‘You are blaspheming’ to the one the Father set apart and sent into the world, because I said: I am the Son of God? If I am not doing my Father’s works, don’t believe me. But if I am doing them and you don’t believe me, believe the works. This way you will know and understand that the Father is in me and I in the Father” (John 10:34–38).

If they are going to the text to justify their mob justice, their “lynch law” (Carson, John, 396), he appeals to the text to defend himself against their assault. He appeals to them with Scripture, what he calls here “your law.” He charges them with inconsistency, with cherry-picking the parts of the Bible they apply with steel-spined rigor. He quotes Psalm 82:6 to them: “I said, ‘You are gods,’” which continues, “‘you are all sons of the Most High.’” Psalm 82 envisions the one God standing in the “divine assembly,” the council of angelic powers and human rulers (82:1). It refers to these powers as “gods,” because divine power authorizes their rule and leadership. God confronts these rulers for privileging the privileged and marginalizing the vulnerable, calling them to advocate for the oppressed (82:2-4). Their minds are dark and the earth shakes with their failures (82:5). At this point, the Psalm confronts them: “You are gods, sons of the Most High.” God has entrusted them with power, such that they present those under their authority with the power of God. They are “sons,” inheritors of the divine throne. But their failure reveals their future: “However, you will die like humans and fall like any other ruler” (82:7). 

By citing this Psalm against the leaders, Jesus both defends himself against their cherry-picking application of Scripture and he also brings a counter-charge. First, he defends himself by pointing out their inconsistent interpretation of Scripture. Basically, he use a Jewish mode of argument called Qal Wahomer, or “lighter to heavier.” He argues that if the Bible can use “gods” about created beings, little “s” sons in some sense, how much more so could the unique, capital “S” Son claim to be one with the Father without blaspheming the Name. Second, he charges them with the failures described in Psalm 82, and sentences them to judgment for that failure. 

He evidences his claim to be the sanctified sent Son through the works he has shown them. As one of the Jewish leaders said after Jesus had unblinded the man in chapter 9: “If this man were not from God, he wouldn’t be able to do anything” (9:33). Assess my actions, he asks them. If these actions are not from the Father, don’t believe me. Look at what I have done. He asks us the same thing today: assess my actions. Look at the what the name of Jesus has done in the world.

When the world shut down for Covid, I leaned into the opportunity to read and listen to God and others through the Good Book, the Bible, and other good books. A favorite was Dominion by Tom Holland (no, not the kid who plays Spider-Man). Holland traces the various threads of Christian faith and practice which have woven the fabric of the origins and developments of our culture and society. Widespread literacy, the dignity of every human person, care for the poor and vulnerable, love above power—these are Christian virtues, ultimately centered in the person and the work of Jesus Christ.

But the long narrative of the world may seem abstract and distanced from us, so we can look even closer. Look at the work of Jesus in the lives of real people. Maybe you witness to this truth, like I do. Maybe you know someone who got super religious, and it makes little sense to you. Yet you can’t deny the change in that person. What can explain a man weeping his thanksgiving while his multi-million dollar enterprise falls like ash around him? What can explain an octagenerian widow praising the name of God after the loss of an adult grandchildren caps off a decade of suffering and sorrow. These folks would tell you a name–Jesus. 

Look at what I have done and I’m still doing, Jesus says. To us, and to them. If we will see, we will see the nature and the face of God: “This way you will know and understand that the Father is in me and I in the Father.” The great theologian John of Damascus (AD 675-749) wrote in Greek and explained this interpersonal relation in God. Theologians today use the Greek word he used: perichoresis, or the English explanation: “mutual indwelling.” The Father and the Son are eternally, fully, personally distinct, while being eternally, fully, personally “in” one another. Thomas Aquinas explained it this way (don’t get too lost in all in the technical medieval scholastic theological language, because there is gold in here): 

There are three points of consideration as regards the Father and the Son; the essence, the relation, and the origin; and according to each the Son and the Father are in each other. The Father is in the Son by His essence, forasmuch as the Father is His own essence, and communicates His essence to the Son not by any change on His part. Hence it follows that as the Father's essence is in the Son, the Father Himself is in the Son; likewise, since the Son is His own essence, it follows that He Himself is in the Father in Whom is His essence. This is expressed by Hilary, “The unchangeable God, so to speak, follows His own nature in begetting an unchangeable subsisting God. So we understand the nature of God to subsist in Him, for He is God in God." It is also manifest that as regards the relations, each of two relative opposites is in the concept of the other. Regarding origin also, it is clear that the procession of the intelligible word is not outside the intellect, inasmuch as it remains in the utterer of the word. What also is uttered by the word is therein contained. And the same applies to the Holy Ghost (Summa Theologica, 1a.42.5-6). 

God is different than creation in general and than humans in particular. We can’t be “in” another person, even a dentist prodding their fingers into your mouth is not a form of “mutual indwelling.” God is different. God externally is and exists in triunity. The Father eternally begets the Son and the Father and Son eternally breathe out the Spirit, without time, without separation, without change, without parts or passions, without loss or gain. The Father is therefore in the Son and the Son is in the Father because they have the identically same essence, nature, or Being. “The Father is in me and I am in the Father and ‘I and the Father are one,’ have the same meaning” (Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on John, 10.6.1466).

Remember the context of Jesus claiming this. He claims that he and the Father hold as with a single hand their people in eternal saving safety, because he and the Father are one Being (10:30). The Jews hear this and charge him with blaspheming the one true and living God of creation and covenant. As they raise the stones to execute him in holy obedience, Jesus stops them and reminds them of the works they have already seen from him. He presses them, again, to look and to see what is real and true. He is the Son of the Father, he is the Word made flesh, he is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. They want with all their hearts to love and know and obey God, but they are missing God in flesh in front of them. 

They are like Paul’s Jewish friends, zealous for God but not according to knowledge (Rom. 10:2). In that passage Paul diagnoses the source of spiritual blindness. He longs for his Jewish brothers and sisters and friends to find salvation by following the Savior. But they are caged in by their own sin: “Since they are ignorant of the righteousness of God and attempted to establish their own righteousness, they have not submitted to God’s righteousness” (Rom. 10:3). In other words, they have bought into the “DIY” mindset that sin baked into the human condition. We want to save ourselves, and we reject the salvation of God. And we can’t see God in front of us. 

So we are called, like they were, to listen and look before it’s too late. 

So he departed again across the Jordan to the place where John had been baptizing earlier, and he remained there. Many came to him and said, “John never did a sign, but everything John said about this man was true.” And many believed in him there (10:40-42).

You might have seen the video when it went viral. Kevin’s uncle, “Uncle Drew,” was not an uncle, not an old man at all. He was NBA star Kyrie Irving in disguise. Now, Jesus didn’t just wear our nature like a costume, but he actually became a human being. God the Son took human nature into his person, so that he was one person who had two distinct natures. 

And he’s inviting you and me to look, to listen, because what he does reveals who he is.  

They had been born again. I don’t remember my post-hippie birth parents (I’ve only seen the pictures and heard some of the stories), because I was raised by fire-breathing, Spirit-filled, holy-rolling, Bible-learning and Bible-teaching Christians, in a Christian family, in a local church. They had been born again, and, before too long, I had been born again as well. My parents and my church trained me and taught me the basics of the Bible and Christian doctrine. They taught me about creation and sin, about Jesus and the cross, about the Holy Spirit and the Psalms. 

And they taught me about the Trinity, “One God in three persons.” Everyone acknowledged that the Trinity is a mystery and ultimately impossible to really understand. Sometimes someone might describe it like an egg (shell, white, yolk) or three-leaf clover, or water as steam, ice, and liquid. No one ever tried to pass these analogies off as actually like the Trinity (which is good, because they aren’t really like the Trinity). 

In some ways, decades of life in the church gave me a sense that the Trinity was non-negotiable while, ultimately, non-intelligible. The Trinity intrigued me, so I was happy when my first semester of seminary offered me the opportunity to take a class on the doctrine. At the end of the semester, the professor said we had barely scratched the surface of studying the Trinity. 

He was one-hundred percent right. 

After seminary, through nearly a decade of pastoring, I taught, preached, and read about the Trinity. I knew it was important, but I still didn’t comprehend how the Trinity centers everything we believe as Christians. The Trinity is not merely important. The Trinity is preeminent. The Trinity is the hub centering everything, in reality and in theology. 

If you were to ask my wife or our church, they would probably tell you that I talk a lot about the Trinity. They’re right. I talk about the Trinity a lot, the doctrine of the Trinity has woven itself through my entire theological vision. Preachers tend to ride favored hobby horses. But that’s not why I talk about the Trinity so much. I talk about the Trinity because the Trinity is just that important, preeminent and central to reality and theology, to the world we live in and the truth we believe. 

God has called me to use my life to communicate his truth through writing and speaking. There is nothing more true that the Trinity, so I write and talk about the Trinity, often. This is true when I expound the Bible to our church, because the Trinity stars as the main character in every part of the Bible. And this is especially true when I expound a section of Scripture that spotlights that star character like the gospel according to John. John might be the most explicitly and clearly trinnitarian book of the Bible. Discovering the Trinity in John is like looking for a needle in a needle-stack. It’s everywhere. 

John sets his terms very clearly from his opening sentence: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). From here, the entire Prologue, the first 18 verses of chapter 1, set the terms of John’s story. There is one, and only one, and only eternally one, God. And the Father is God and the Word is God. 

What we call the Old Testament, John simply called “the Bible.” And John knew his Bible, backwards and forwards. From the first verses of the story of beginnings in the book of Genesis—“In the beginning God,” to Moses seeing the flaming bush and fire-seared mountains of the covenant, to the clear confession: “Listen, Israel: Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one” (Deuternomoy 6:4). John knew that there was one, only, eternally, one God. That God created the cosmos and covenanted with his creation, and told his people his name: Yahweh, the LORD. The God of creation and the God of covenant. John knew all of this. John believed all of this. John knew God. John believed God. John loved God.

And so John wrote the story of his best friend Jesus. He calls Jesus the Word. Echoing the first sentence of the Bible, “In the beginning God,” John surprises us from the start: “In the beginning was the Word.” But lest we think that God is only the Word, he says, “and the Word was with God.” But lest we think that this means that the God is not the Word, he says, “and the Word was God.” He explains that “in the beginning,” before the creation, the Word was already there: “He was with God in the beginning” (1:2). He doesn’t say “it” was with God, but that he was with God. The Word, John tells us, is not a thing but a person. As if that weren’t enough to short-circuit our little brains, he explains that God who created is the Word: “All things were created through him, and apart from him not one thing was created that has been created” (1:3). Lest we think that the Word being with God somehow means that the Word was created, John says, “No, don’t make that mistake. The Word is the Creator, not part of the creation. He’s on the God side of the canyon between Creator and creature.” John explains that God the Word became a human being, and lived among John and his friends, family, and neighbors: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (1:14a). Then he explains that the Word is the glorious, only-begotten Son from the Father: “We observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (1:14). Finally, John explains the Word is his friend, Jesus, the Christ (1:17). 

This prologue opens wide the way for John’s story to develop, and along that way he keeps cluing us in to who Jesus actually is, and who God the Trinity actually is. God is not merely, “God” in a generic sense. He’s not even merely “Yahweh” in the Old Testament. In the gospel and the New Testament Yahweh, the Creator and Covenant God, more fully reveals his name and his nature: God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is a Trinity. 

Jesus through John tells us this over and over again, like we just saw in John 1. He tell us this in John 5 that the Father and the Son do the same, identical work: “Jesus responded to them, ‘My Father is still working, and I am working also’” (5:17). The Father and the Son have the same, identical will: “And just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so the Son also gives life to whom he wants” (5:21). The Father and the Son have the same, identical life: “For just as the Father has life in himself, so also he has granted to the Son to have life in himself” (5:26). 

How can this be? How can the Father and the Son have the same work, will, and life? We don’t have anything in our lives to compare this to. We can do the same kind of work as someone, like at Christmas when my wife, Laura, and I wrap gifts together. We can wrap separate gifts at the same time. We can wrap the same gift, but in different ways or times. But we can’t wrap the same gift, in exactly the same way, at exactly the same time, because we are two different people. But, you ask, aren’t the Father and the Son two different persons like you and your wife? They are two persons, but not like Laura and me. We are two persons with two lives and two wills. The Father and the Son are two persons, but with one life, one will. Laura and I are two persons in two distinct natures. The Father and the Son are two persons in exactly the same nature. 

That’s what Jesus says through John’s narrative in John 10:30: “I and the Father, we are one.” To really grasp the sense of this, let’s look at the whole paragraph of the words of Jesus. He’s answering the question from the religious leaders in Israel: “How long are you going to keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly” (10:24). Jesus answers:

“I did tell you and you don’t believe,” Jesus answered them. “The works that I do in my Father’s name testify about me. But you don’t believe because you are not of my sheep. My sheep hear my voice, I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all. No one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.” (10:25-30). 

Jesus explains that these hearers don’t believe because of their spiritual deafness. Jesus has said and shown sufficient signs, but their hearts are hard. He explains, like he did in chapter 5, that he and the Father do the same work. Historically, theologians had a Latin phrase to explain this truth: opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt, “The works of the Trinity in the world are inseparable, undivided.” Because the Father and the Son and the Spirit have the same nature, they have the same will and the same work. It’s not as though the Father does something, then the Son copies him. No. They do the same work, from the same will, at the same time in the world, both in the work of creation and the work of redemption. 

Jesus confronts the goats and comforts his sheep, his people with this truth. The people of God are an eternal, unreturnable gift of the Father to the Son in the covenant of redemption. The single hand of God, the hand of the Son and the hand of the Father, the hand of power and life, holds the people of God invincible, safe, and deeply loved. The basis for this security (for the believer) and this fearsome fact (for the unbeliever): the singular nature of the triune God. 

Look again at verse 30. Jesus says: “I and the Father are one.” The authors of the New Testament authored their gospels and epistles in Greek. Without boring you, I can tell you that reading this in Greek helps us understand what Jesus is claiming. The way John wrote this down in Greek helps us, because we see here two critical things. First, he uses a first-person, plural verb—“we are.” Second, he uses a neuter adjective—“one.” In Greek, when an adjective like “one” or “the” is neuter, it implies the English translation “thing.” So, literally, we can translate this verse, “I and the Father, we are one thing.” 

And in this we see the mystery of the Trinity. At the heart of reality, at the center of Being, is the God who is both “one” and “we.” 

God is “One”: The Divine Nature

A nature is the defining characteristics of a thing. A tree by nature roots itself into the soil, grows a thick section in the middle (a trunk), and smaller branches from that trunk. A horse by nature has four legs, a tail, a neck, and a head. A human by nature has two arms, two legs, a brain, a heart, a mind and a soul. God by nature is perfect life, love, eternity, power, wisdom, and all of the attributes or “perfections” of God. God by nature is one; for God to be God is for God to be one, only, singular Being. 

The Old Testament witnesses so clearly to this fact that the church never considered becoming polytheistic, never considering for a moment the possibility of worshipping two or three co-equal, different gods. There is only one God. It could only ever be this way, because God defines goodness, greatness, and glory. David sings his testimony in Psalm 16:2, “I said to the LORD, ‘You are my Lord, and I have nothing good besides you.” If God was not one, God could not be the greatest good. God would be some greater thing called “good” by which the two or three things are measured. But God is simply, eternally, self-sufficiently good, life, and love. 

God is Being. God, simply, is.

God is one. 

God is “We”: The Divine Persons

But God is also “we.” God is also three. He is not three, however, in the same way that he is one. He is one in nature, essence, being. He is three in terms of relations or persons. Long ago, Augustine explained the significance of this: “He does not say, I am the Father, or I and the Father is one. But when he said, ‘I and the Father are one,’ hear both ‘one thing’ and ‘we are,’ and you will be free of both Charybdis and Scylla. In these two words, the word ‘one thing’ [unum] frees you from the Arian, and the word ‘we are’ [sumus] frees you from the Sabellian. If ‘one thing,’ then not different; if ‘we are,’ then both the Father and the Son” (Augustine, Tractates on John, 36.9).

Charybdis and Scylla were characters from ancient Greek mythology that described the dangers of sea travel. On the one side was Scylla the rocks that could shred a ship to string and on the other side the Charybdis was a whirling pool that could suck a ship to the seafloor. These two dangers required careful sailing to preserve the lives of those aboard the ship. Augustine points out two historic dangers of the sea-voyage of Christian faith and the doctrine of the Trinity. On one side is the heresy of Sabellius, who taught that God is one in nature and in person, that the Father and the Son are the same person in different manifestations at different times. We can also call this error “modalism,” because it says that the Father and the Son are only different modes of the same person. On the other hand is the heresy of Arius. Arius reacted to Sabellius by teaching that the Father was the true God, and the Son was a second created being of slightly lesser status. We can also call this error “subordinationism,” because it says that the Son is not equal with the Father. 

Instead, the Bible points us to the truth of the Trinity. God is one being in three persons. The Bible pulls back the curtain on this beautiful, profound mystery and glimpses the way that God can be three persons in one divine nature. Theologians call this biblical teaching “eternal relations of origin.” The Father and the Son and the Spirit are not randomly assembled as the one God. They are related to each other in specific ways. 

The Father eternally begets or generates the Son, and the Father and Son simultaneously as one breathe out or spirate the Holy Spirit. 

The Father gives, the Son receives, and the Spirit is the bond of the Gift between them. 

The Father loves, the Son is beloved, and the Spirit is the bond of Love between them. 

The Bible shows us this all over the place. 

“You are my Son, today I have begotten you” (Psalm 2:7). The Bible describes the Son as the “only-begotten” Son as the one who has life in himself by receiving life from the Father. We can’t wrap our minds around this. Human generation happens in space and time, because humans are bound by space and time. Divine generation happens eternally, because God is eternal. There was never a time when the Father was not giving life and love to his Son and spirating the Spirit. 

The Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son: “The Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have told you” (John 14:26). The sending of the Son and the Spirit reveal the eternal nature of God. The Father sends the Son because the Father eternally begets the the Son. The Father and the Son send the Spirit because they eternally breathe out the Spirit. 

Remember, Jesus through John does not explain the deep things of the Trinity in an abstract theological lecture. He explains it because it matters. Why should you care about the Trinity? Because only the triune God is real. Because only the triune God is life. Only the triune God is love. Only the triune God saves us from the constant and real danger of the flesh, world, and the devil. 

Why should you care about the Trinity? Because, as the kids sometimes say on social media: this is everything.

What a wild and surreal season we are in! Between social distancing and new school and work schedules, in some ways we're busier than we have ever been. Between fear of the spread of the disease and faith in the strength of the Lord, we're experiencing a wide range of spiritual and emotional responses. I know this is a trying time for many of you. You're concerned about work, family, school, and our nation. Some of you are in danger of losing your job. Others of you are missing out on a long-planned event like a graduation, family vacation, or wedding. 

You might remember that in the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20), Jesus promises to be with us "always." Literally, the original Greek reads, "all the days." I love that thought. By his Spirit, the Comforter, Jesus is with us all the days. He is with us on prosperous days and impoverished days. He is with us on days filled with faith and days feeble with fear. He is with us on days on the road and days quarantined at home. He is with us in our community of believers and in our social distancing. 

In just a minute, I want to share a few updates with you. Before that, I want you to know that our church ministry (like many areas of life right now) is re-writing a temporary playbook on a moment by moment basis. In that light, please let me know how I can serve you as your pastor in this season. You can always email (danny@crossunited.org) or call/text (954-873-2077). 

With that said, here are a few things to know about some of our plans for the days ahead.

1. We are suspending all physical, in-person gatherings through the end of March. This aligns with the President's recommendation of 15 days to stop the spread of the coronavirus. The Ladies Bible Study has already been working on a way to meet virtually through Zoom. For the men, we will work to set up a phone-in system. 

2. I will be doing a daily teaching at 1pm on Facebook Live. This will be a study in Habakkuk called, "Living Faith in a Season of Crisis." After Habakkuk, I will look at another study we can pursue together. This will be available via Facebook Live and video replay on our church Facebook page. It will also be uploaded to our regular church podcast stream. 

3. I am working to set up a phone-in prayer line. I will let you know when it's up and running. 

4. Our next couple of Sundays will look at lot like this past Sunday. I will provide an online Bible lesson/sermon, and we will point you to resources for worshipping God in your home. 

5. Please continue to give financially. By God's grace, most of our church already worships through giving through our online option. If you have never set this up, now is a great time to start! You can give online here. You can also text (941) 702-9001 to set up secure giving via text. 

6. If you need financial assistance, please let me know. If this crisis has hurt you financially and you need resources, Cross United Church stands ready to help. We are a family. 

7. If you need help running errands or getting groceries, let me know. I realize some of you might not be able to safely go for food or groceries. We are ready, willing, and looking forwarding to helping if so. We are a family.  

Again, let me know if you need anything. 

As always, I love you, I'm praying for you, and I will, Lord willing, see you soon. 

Love,
Pastor Danny

If you are a part of Cross United Church, please let us know if you need anything, and look for opportunities to worship God by serving your neighbors in preparation. 

As I studied the Scripture, God used Romans 10:12-15 to move me toward actually starting a new church: “There is no distinction between Jew and Greek, because the same Lord of all richly blesses all who call on him. For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. How, then, can they call on him they have not believed in? And how can they believe without hearing about him? And how can they hear without a preacher? And how can they preach unless they are sent?” While reading this passage, God showed me that being called to start a new church was not necessarily a mysterious, mystical thing. In fact, there are only a few basic qualifications listed here. First, I must believe that any person—regardless of economic status or ethnic group—any person who calls on the name of the Lord Jesus will be saved. Second, I must be willing to be sent out to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. God used this passage to call me to start a new church in the area I call home, a church that brings people to God and brings people together through the cross of Jesus Christ. This is our heartbeat and the heartbeat of our new God-venture called Cross United Church. We are alive with passion to see the stories of Acts come to life again in the 21st century in South Florida. We want to help you turn off auto-pilot and find life like God intended in a relationship with God and others through the cross of Jesus Christ. 

We're getting ready, because God is using us to plant a new church. Maybe you're tired of life on auto-pilot, life in isolation, and you want to join? We have a spot on the team for you!