Believing is Seeing (Part 2)

It is possible to walk with Jesus day-in and day-out for twelve months, to see him perform signs, to hear him preach on the biggest stage in all of Palestine during the biggest time of the year, and not hear a word he is saying, not see a thing he is doing. 

            The story of John 5:1-9 is offensive to some.  Jesus walks past hundreds of sick and maimed and heals a single person.  The Scripture shows Jesus having compassion on this single paralyzed old man.  But what about everybody else?  That must mean that he didn’t have compassion for hundreds of people, right? 

No, actually.  The response of the crowds and the disciples to the time when Jesus shows compassion on the thousands sheds some light on why Jesus does not heal everybody, how it is that our belief would not be stronger “if only we could see him”.  We are given a dramatic example of what people had been seeing when they saw Jesus. 

            One of the most beautiful things about Scripture is that it tells the story not only of God’s interaction with mankind, but the story of man’s response to God’s action.  John 6:1-15 is as much about Jesus’ compassion as it is about everyone else missing it.  In their search for Leonidas they came across Jesus of Nazareth, a carpenter, who everyone loves and follows (except the leaders), who has powers of healing and apparently can multiply food.  Sounds like an unbeatable general in the making.  He can heal his troops and feed entire armies (five thousand men, remember) in the blink of an eye.  And this is what turns the table on our reading not only of John 5:1-9 but our reading of anything Jesus does.  The question is no longer “why didn’t Jesus heal everyone”, but “why did Jesus heal anyone?”  He knew full well that his actions would be misinterpreted.  He knew full well that everything he did and said would be misinterpreted, misconstrued, and distorted. 

            But the Father always has a plan.  Everything God does has purpose.  And everything Jesus did makes sense in light of the Cross.  Everything he said and did was pointing to it; the turning of water into wine pointed to the new life that his death and resurrection would bring to the world; his words with the woman at the well in chapter four spoke of the nature of eternal life that was coming; his healing of the paralyzed man and the feeding of the five thousand were concrete expressions of the new life signified by every word and action up to that point- and everything points to the Cross, the epitome of God’s Word to the world, when Jesus, the Word (John 1:1), who spoke and did so much, finally falls silent with a wordless cry (Mark 15:7), when the heart of God is literally, literally poured out (John 19:34). 

            We see in the feeding of the five thousand, in every action and word of the Word, Jesus the Christ, the perfect image of God.  And the image is of a God who literally pours out his heart, in blood and water, for the world.  The challenge for the world, in response to the action of this God, is to have faith.  We see in all the Gospels that simply seeing, with our eyes, is not the way to faith, that our faith would not be any stronger were Jesus to stand in front of us and begin to speak.  We are left with the task of knowing that Jesus is always in the room (Acts 17:27-28), that anything is possible because Jesus Christ was raised from the dead.  We are left with the task of living in Truth that already is.  And so it is faith that we need, not sight.

Believing is Seeing (Part 1)

Jesus is a crazy guy.  It turns out that you can walk with him, literally, for years and still not know who he really is.  You can, literally, spend every day and every night with him for years straight and, in the middle of such a “life season” or “trial period”, still believe him to be King Leonidas.  In fact that is almost exactly who the crowds and even his closest disciples believed him to be by the time we get to chapter six in the gospel of John. 

            OK, so “King Leonidas might be a slight exaggeration.  But the exaggeration really is slight.  The Jews of first century Palestine, those who populated the crowds that follow Jesus in John 6 and the time period in which the story takes place, all expected their Messiah to be a powerful military figure.  Their Messiah would be the one to lead Israel against the Romans, the one to free God’s people from the yoke of the pagans.  And this expectation or, better yet, the eagerness for the coming of this prophetic figure was at an all-time hi during the first century.  An example of the fire in the hearts of these ancient Jews would be any video clip from the Libyan rebellion against the regime of Muammar Gaddafi.  The Libyan rebellion is not an exact parallel of the situation of first century Palestine but does suggest what the climate of Jerusalem was like under Roman rule.

            Imagine the kind of individual it would take to lead a rebellion like the one in Libya.  Chances are your mind conjured up, if not Leonidas himself, some sort of ethnic variation of the famous Spartan (always with a beard, of course).  Actually all you need to do is change John 2:16 to “THIS IS SPARTA!” and Jesus starts to seem pretty dang ripped.  But let’s get back to John 6.

            Actually, to John 6:1-15.  The feeding of the five thousand was perhaps the greatest sign performed by Jesus during his ministry, hence it’s being the only miracle recorded by all four gospels.  All of the gospels have subtly different chronologies but in John the feeding of the five thousand take place at least twelve months into Jesus’ ministry.  We know this because the Passover festival was and is celebrated once every twelve months and verse four tells us the time of the Passover was near when this sign took place, the second time in the gospel that the Passover has appeared so far.  John does not specify the amount of time that lapsed between John 2:13 (the first mention of the Passover) and the stories preceding it.  We will take the conservative route and say that by the time the feeding of the five thousands occurs not only have rumors and stories about this Jesus guy been circulating towns and hills of Palestine, not only have thousands seen him heal and preach in the temple in Jerusalem, but at least twelve men, whom Jesus called his disciples, have been at Jesus’ side virtually every hour of every day since Jesus asked them to follow him.  Such was the relationship between a Rabbi and his disciples.  Class was not in session during select hours of select days of the week.  Rather, class was never not in session.  One learned from one’s Rabbi by watching and listening to everything he did and said.

            The feeding of the five thousand was truly incredible.  A careful reading of verse ten reveals that only the men were counted.  The customary way to estimate or count a large crowd was to count the men.  If you figure (conservatively) that every other man had a wife and a child then it is highly likely that there were at least ten thousand people on this great grassy plain. 

For all its grandeur the feeding of the five thousand ends as a tragedy.  The crowds are amazed at the powers of Jesus and try to forcibly capture him and make him their king.  For all his efforts people have yet to see and hear who Jesus is.  Verse fifteen ends with an important detail, “Jesus, as he realized they were about to come and take him by force and make him king, fled back to the hills alone” (New Jerusalem Bible).  That he was forced to flee alone, without his posse following at his heels or protecting him, means that his posse was on the same page as the crowds who saw not Jesus, the Lamb of God (1:29), but King Leonidas.  

Like A Child

Alone in the wild.  A reality show in 2010 bore this name.  It featured the story of Ed Wardle, a born-and-raised wilderness man.  Ed has spent his entire life in love with nature.  But Ed’s love for nature is much more “hands on” than most.  In Orange County (let alone Southern California) it is not uncommon to hear “love for nature” equated with “appreciation of sunsets”.  Nothing is wrong with the equation, sure.  But it fails to really describe people like Ed.  See, Ed has climbed Mt. Everest twice.  And been on an expedition to the North Pole.  His astonishing resume can be viewed here, but let it be known that Ed is, quite frankly, unnatural. 

            Naturally, Ed had always dreamed of living alone in the wild and wanted to prove to himself that he could, if necessary.  The National Geographic Channel decided they’d like to give Ed the opportunity.  And wanted him to film it of course.  Alone In The Wild was born.  Ed was given the task of surviving alone in the Yukon Territory in Northern Canada for 3 months, living off the wildlife he could legally catch.  The story was compelling while it lasted.  Ed called it quits 5 weeks short of the goal.  But the 7 weeks of footage really were remarkable.  He lost 28 pounds and became literally sick with loneliness.  That majestic, beautiful wilderness which had always drawn Ed to such fantastic heights (literally) became cold, cruel, and dispassionate.  In a singularly powerful moment Ed confesses that nature, in all its beauty, could care less whether or not he starved to death.  The greatest teacher is life, after all.

            What would Ed have thought if he had read Psalm 19:1-4 while sitting in such a dismal classroom?

1 The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. 
2 Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. 
3 They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. 
4 Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. 
In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun.

Mr. Wardle may have reacted any number of ways.  Dying of hunger, going mad with loneliness, because of a river’s refusal to provide fish, of an unseen predator always lurking in the dark, from any and every noise completely lacking any trace of human causation, it doesn’t take the imagination of a Nick Fetner or a Jordan Benedict to know how Ed would have felt were he to read that the thing killing him was also glorifying God.  He may have questioned the psalmist; his character or life experience.  But the psalmist didn’t write this poem out of ignorance.  Exposure to weather was a little more widespread 3,000 years ago in the Middle East than it is today in the West.  Ed may have questioned the nature of this god; a god who is glorified by a thing capable of such fatal apathy as nature must be just that- fatally apathetic. 

            Despite the incredible distance between the experience of people who lived so wildly 3,000 years ago (or Ed today) and the rest of modern western society, a certain peculiar proximity between the two peoples does exist.  In fact the parallels are quite obvious.  Ed exposed himself to a world that could literally take his life at any moment.  It would not ask his permission.  Were a bear to smell the dead porcupine hanging next to Ed in that tree it would not have asked for a leg of porcupine.  The bear (and this thought tormented Ed all night) would probably have eaten Ed himself.  And that’s pretty much how it works.  By now some of you may already know where this is going.  It almost goes without saying that life in America over the last several years can be described in very similar terms.  Bears may not have haunted us in the night, but millions learned the implications of living in a world where the majority of capital is controlled by the minority.  A few bank owners behave like humans and the global economy is thrown into a nosedive that no one can see an end to.  Millions learned that saving up for retirement, like hanging a porcupine in a tree, does not guarantee that the bear won’t eat you AND your porcupine. 

            But there is good news.  We are not alone.  The machine or bear or whatever shape it happens to take does not have the final say.  Actually, it has already been defeated.  In actuality, the victory is ours (1^st Cor. 15:54-57).  We, as His children, no longer fear bears or machines (Lk. 12:4-5) because, in all truth, they cannot touch us (Rom. 8:37-39).  Our Father can literally, morning after morning, cover the earth around us with provisions (Ex. 16:4-5).  But we choose death when we turn our cares from Him to His provisions (16:20, 27).  It was with Mt. 6:25-34 in mind that a wise man once said, “God cares for tomorrow, and if man cares about God, then his tomorrow is also taken care of.”

            The good news is appalling when circumstances are the dominating filter through which it’s received.  But good news is good news, even when it’s salty.  Ed Wardle learned a hard lesson out in the Yukon Territory about the love of his life.  But his love did not turn to hatred.  His love actually grew.  Ed was humbled.  He realized that, ultimately, he is not in control.  The will of the Father is that His children would know this and more: to be His children we must act as His children, having faith like a child (Mk. 10:13-16), completely vulnerable and dependent on our Father for everything.  This is good news, that the One in whom all things exist (Rom. 11:36) is also the giver of life itself (Jn. 5:21), that if our hands reach out to receive instead of to grab our Father will give us His kingdom (Mk. 10:13-16).  May we stand in this truth for heaven’s sake.

The Universal Presence

“God is not far from any one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17: 27-28)

This verse is spoken by St. Paul in his speech to the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers at the meeting of the Areopagus and was meant to illustrate the tangibility of the Christian God, whom Paul associated with the “unknown god” that these Greeks reserved a place for in their worship.  Tangibility.  Not a word that is typically associated with “unknown”.  But Paul does, because his God is.

The god Paul is witnessing to is close.  Very close, in fact.  How close, you might ask?  Paul, in his effort to witness to the closeness of his god, points to life itself.  And what does life, in part, depend on?  Air.  Oxygen.  You know, the stuff that travels through your mouth, down your trachea, into your lungs, through your bloodstream, bringing strength and life to the billions of cells in your body.  And then it is exhaled.  Your body gently pushes it out of your lungs, through your vocal cords, which vibrate at varying frequencies producing sound.  The movement of your mouth and tongue control the release of this oxygen, these sounds, and hence the source of your voice.  But it is this stuff, air, oxygen, which only imperfectly illustrates the nearness of Paul’s god.  Because Paul’s god is closer than the air in your lungs, your vascular system, and your trachea. 

How can this be?  How can any-thing, let alone any person, let alone any god, be closer to your Self than air?  But even the “air” metaphor (not that Paul is speaking metaphorically), stretched and pushed to its limit, fails to do justice to the intimacy of Paul’s god. 

How about being?  Paul says that we have our being in his god.  The Greek word for being is ousia, which can also mean “existence”.  Paul tells us that he exists IN his god, explaining his previous statement, showing how it is that his god “is not far from any one of us”.  Really, this truth Paul is witnessing to has its source back before time, before the Beginning itself.  This is what Tozer calls “the universal presence”.

Unfortunately we (21^st century American Christians) tend to err in the same direction as the ancient Greek philosophers that Paul spoke to thousands of years ago.  Sure, we don’t refer to our God as unknown, and we don’t (explicitly) worship the gods of the Greek pantheon.  But practically?  Minute-to-minute?  From Monday to Saturday?  Once our Sunday singing ends?  God all too often is relegated to the corner, the little labeled box with his name on it, to the back of our minds waiting to be acknowledged again next Sunday.  Far too often our God, the God of St. Paul, is practically unknown.  Unfortunately I know this more from honest self-examination than observation of other people, though finding a self-proclaimed Christian who fails to consistently live out their beliefs isn’t the most daunting task imaginable. 

We know His name, Jesus Christ, “through [whom] all things were made” (John 1:3).  He is not unknown.  He has made himself known.  And not just himself, but in him we see the Father, “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Hebrews 1:3).  And he lives in us.  Sit with that.  Sit with that when you wake up in the morning.  Sit with that as you drive to work.  Sit with that in the midst of conversations.  Sit with it, so that your Sunday singing spills into Monday, and then Tuesday, into your living, moving, and breathing.
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