As we reflect again upon the beautiful love of Christ for us in the "Good Shepherd" passage of St. John 11, let us recognise the very heartbeat of the passage: "I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine, even as the Father knoweth me, and I know the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep" (1928 BCP). We focus on the laying down of the life of the Shepherd, for a number of reasons; it is surely the Great Act of divine love (Rom. 5:8). But in these words above, Christ communicates the intimate relationship to which He invites His sheep, which loving communion inspires His willingness to lay down His life for us, sheep going astray. He compares the degree of intimacy He has with His sheep to the degree of "knowing" intimacy He has with His Father. Bishop Westcott writes: The relation of Christ to His people corresponds with that of the Son to the Father. Comp. vi. 57, xiv. 20, xv. 10, xvii.21. The words are not simply a compa...

One day in Oxford, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were lamenting together how few books there were of the kind that they liked. They concluded that the thing to do was to write some. They decided on stories of science fiction and time-travel. They flipped a coin and Lewis wrote his space trilogy. Tolkien began a time-travel story entitled The Lost Road. He never finished it. What he did write is worth reading – it is a good story – but it is especially interesting in that Tolkien wrote himself into the story. The qualities he gives to one of the main characters were from his own life. The story thus has something of an autobiographical aspect to it. I cannot help but reflect upon what it might be like for an author, who has created a world in story, to suddenly find himself actually in that story as one of the characters. What would Tolkien have thought and felt if he suddenly woke up, like a couple of the men in his story, as a living person in another world and time – one which he ...

If you are not familiar with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice , I will tell you that the main character is a young lady named Elizabeth Bennett, who meets two young men, for whom she has opposing opinions. One, named Wickham, she considers quite charming. The other, Mr. Darcy, is revolting to her because of his pride. However, as the story unfolds, Elizabeth finds that Wickham is, in fact, a dangerous man and Darcy turns out to be the most amiable and respectable man she has ever known. The happy ending of the story is a direct result of the changes in her understanding concerning these two men. I mention Austen’s story because it is a good example of the significant consequences that can attend the right or wrong understanding we may have of the important people in our lives and there is none more important in all of our lives than Jesus Christ. The colour of our lives on earth and the endings of our lives, whether they be happy or not, are dependent on who we think Jesus is. If I we...

Chapters 12-17 of the Gospel of St. John contain some of the most personal and intimate words that Jesus spoke to His disciples in all the gospel accounts. The setting of these words is deeply moving. The image of Jesus, in the upper room with his disciples, on the very night of his betrayal, evokes a strong impression of the emotions that must have filled the room: Jesus’ own emotions, knowing what was about to happen; the disciples emotions, hearing Him say that one of them would betray Him and that he was soon to leave them. These all add to the impact of the words which He spoke to them. What is more, because Jesus was trying to encourage His disciples, the chapters contain many famous deeds and sayings of Jesus that bring comfort to us today, such things as the foot-washing passage, the assurances of Jesus’ love, His promise of the Spirit, and, like a great crescendo in a musical piece, His priestly prayer in chapter 17. It is true that, some of the things Jesus said that night pe...

Excerpt from sermon, Trinity VI, 2006 Having commented on 5:31-37, where Jesus lists those who witness to his identity and mission, I said: Why did the Jews not believe? Why, in the face of these three mighty witnesses – none of which they could contradict – did they not believe? Jesus gives us the answer in the rest of the passage. It was for two reasons. One is in verses 43 and 44. Jesus says, “I am come in my Father's name, and ye receive me not: if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive. How can ye believe, which receive honour one of another, and seek not the honour that cometh from God only?” They were more preoccupied with how they could impress their fellows with their own religious attainments than with knowing the Messiah when they saw him. They were men-pleasers and men-pleasers are idolators. They let someone else beside God be the main factor in what they decided to do with their lives; with what they did and said. They served men ...

In John 6, Jesus confronts the Jews with their unbelief in a fashion incongruous with their sympathies and certainly with our own. He tells them, in effect, that they did not believe in him because the Father was not drawing them to him. 44: No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day.45: It is written in the prophets, And they shall be all taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto me. Why would he do such a thing? Did he not realise that such talk opens the door to accusations against God of unfairness? If you want to say anything that causes people to get angry with God, it is such a statement. Well, of course we believe he knew what he was doing. It is we who need our thinking adjusted. In trying to understand why Jesus would say this, let's consider further the effect that such a statement has upon fallen people. First of all, it offends our pride. We do not l...

Some Protestants do not think Jesus was talking about the Lord’s Supper when he spoke of our eating his flesh and drinking his blood in St. John 6 (e.g., Simeon). Others think that Jesus was indeed talking about the Lord’s Supper and that that is when we partake of him in a spiritual manner (Wright). Then there are those who think there is truth in both understandings (Moule). I, for one, must think that Jesus at least had the Lord’s Supper in mind. I do so because of the way St. John has written his gospel. I appeal to John’s literary craft as a source of understanding what he is saying to us. You will recall that the Lord’s Supper was instituted on the final Passover Jesus celebrated with his disciples, in the upper room. Well, the upper room is all over chapter 6. First of all, the whole story of chapter 6 takes place at the time of the Passover. When Jesus feeds the multitude, he does so in very much the same way he fed the disciples in the upper room: he gives thanks and passes th...

In St. John 7, we find that there is a prerequisite to spiritual illumination. Jesus tells us in v. 17, “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.” Obedience to what is known comes before understanding of the unknown. Instead of our saying, “Once I understand everything, then I’ll start doing it,” we should say, “I’ll start living by what I know now, and I will trust the Lord to help me understand more later.” That is the way to grow in spiritual illumination. God’s truth always has a moral component. There is no such thing as something God has for us to know that is not also, in some way, something he has for us to be or do. Everything has its ethical implications. Also, God does not give us more illumination if we do not appreciate what we already have. As Jesus said in Matthew 13, speaking of spiritual illumination, 12: “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance….” Thus, if we do ...

Regarding the reaction of the Jews to Jesus in St. John 8 : My concern this morning is that we do not make the mistake of thinking that these Jewish people behaved so badly because that’s what Jews do. That’s absurd. They lied to themselves, they refused to face the truth about who they really were before God, because they were men. We all have had this tendency ever since the garden of Eden, when Adam refused to face up to the truth about his ultimate responsibility for his and his wife’s disobedience. This temptation to prefer falsehoods that build up our pride over truths that humble us follows us even into our Christian lives. We who have believed in Jesus are now the children of God. By God’s grace, we have received the truth of Jesus and we have been set free by it. We are no longer slaves of sin. Our minds are no longer under the dominion of the lies of this world and the devil. We have begun to experience a taste of the liberty that belongs to the sons of God. But being the son...

There are many debts that western Christendom owes to the Anglican Church. One of them, you may be surprised to learn, is for the arrangement of the books and chapters of our Bibles. Historians assert that the first person to divide the Bible into defined chapters was Stephen Langton (c. 1150 - July 9, 1228). Langton, among other things, was the Archbishop of Canterbury. Thus we owe it to one of the Church of England’s Archbishops that the portion of the Gospel we read earlier today, concerning Jesus as the good shepherd, is in the 10th chapter. It could not have been an easy task to make these chapter divisions, and I’m sure that Langton himself would have puzzled over where to make the best breaks. The words of Jesus concerning the shepherding of his flock are lengthy and seem to deserve a place of their own, but we have to admit the fact that the division between ch. 9 and ch. 10 is a problem. If we go back to the end of ch. 9 and then read on into 10, we realise that Jesus has not ...

The following is an excerpt of my sermon for the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, '06: We must “continue in his love;” there is to be an ongoing vital relationship between the vine and the branches, for which the branches themselves have a responsibility. Since our spiritual welfare depends on our abiding in the vine, how we are to abide in the vine becomes a very important question for us. To know how we are to abide in the vine, we need to understand more of what Jesus is talking about when he speaks of himself as the vine. We need to know what we are to abide in. As Bishop N. T. Wright explains in a recent commentary on this passage, there are two ways to understand how Jesus is our vine. We are grafted into the vine through a corporate connection and a private connection. First of all, to understand what I mean by a corporate connection, consider that Jesus’ calling himself a vine was not an arbitrary allusion. He could have likened himself to a tree, for ...

An excerpt from my sermon for the Ninteenth Sunday after Trinity, 2006: Critical for our attention regarding the gift of the Spirit to these saddening disciples, is his description, by Jesus, as “another Comforter”. First, he is another Comforter” as we read in v. 16. In other words, he’s going to do for them the same kinds of things Jesus was doing for them, even at that moment. As Jesus says, in v. 18, he will not leave them comfortless. He has been a comfort to them, in so many, many ways. Jesus brought comfort to his disciples by ensuring them of their being loved by the Father and forgiven of their sins. He brought them comfort by helping them to understand the Scriptures and the wonderful things God intended for them therein. He was also just a good, trusted friend who cared for them. They fear this needed comfort will be taken away from them, but Jesus assures them that it will not. He is sending them someone else to take over the job. But the word translated “Co...

In our study of the Gospel of St. John, we have come to chapter 11 and the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. Having read earlier in the service the story of Jesus bringing the young man back to life in Luke 4, we realise that this was not the first time that Jesus demonstrated that he is the Lord of life. However, there are differences between the two stories that are very important and instructive. For one thing, the young man had just died and was being carried to his funeral. Lazarus, however, had been dead for four days when Jesus brought him back to life. You will recall how, when Jesus commanded that the stone be rolled away from the entrance to Lazarus’ tomb, that Martha complained of how Lazarus, having been there so long, would be decayed and smelly. Lazarus had already begun to turn back into the dust from which all men are made. Jesus’ raising of Lazarus is thus not only indicative of his power to give life, but to give life to dust – reminding us of...

An Excerpt from my sermon for the 23rd Sunday After Trinity, 2006; John 18 & 19. I had been arguing that Jesus is represented in chapters 18 & 19 as in complete control of the events. His portrayal as the King backs up that argument:Finally, we have the symbolism of the two presentations of Jesus to the Jews. We have just read of Jesus, presented to the Jews attired with crown and robe, and the words, “Behold the Man.” In this attire, the Roman soldiers had been calling him king of the Jews. Later, without the crown and robe, quite torn up from his beating, he is presented to them again, this time Pilate says, “behold your king!” Thus twice Jesus is portrayed as the king of the Jews, which we know he was. But these events help to emphasise that Jesus, being the King, was ultimately in control of what was happening. He had come as King of all to be the promised King of Israel, and he would take that throne after he had accomplished his death. The cross was his path to the throne...