John 7:10-24

00:00:00:23 – 00:00:29:24
Clint Loveall
Hey, everybody. Thanks for being with us again as we continue through the Gospel of John, the seventh chapter. Just a just a reminder. If you weren’t with us yesterday, we had a passage in which Jesus’s brothers. And you can go back and unpack all that if you’d like to watch yesterday’s episode. Jesus, brothers, tell him he he should go to this festival, the Festival of the booths, which is in, in Judea.

00:00:29:29 – 00:00:50:22
Clint Loveall
And Jesus says, I’m not going. You go if you want. And it’s a significant passage. It’s not particularly theological, but there’s a lot in there. And again, if you missed yesterday’s discussion, it might be worth going back to pick it up. But today we continue in verse ten of chapter seven. And we find out that there’s more to the story.

00:00:50:24 – 00:01:17:30
Clint Loveall
So I’m going to read a few verses here. Then we’ll come back and talk our way through them. Verse ten. But after his brothers had gone to the festival, then he also went not publicly, but as it were, in secret. The Jews were looking for him at the festival and saying, where is he? And there was considerable complaining about him among the crowds, while some were saying he’s a good man.

00:01:17:34 – 00:01:45:58
Clint Loveall
Others were saying, no, he is deceiving the crowd. Yet no one would speak openly about him for fear of the Jews. Let’s just stop there, Michael. Just a couple of verses in. So, after this kind of, it’s probably overstated to call it an argument. After this discussion with Jesus and his brothers, we find out Jesus does, in fact, go up to the festival and his brothers had told him, you know, you should go and be seen.

00:01:46:03 – 00:02:11:25
Clint Loveall
And Jesus instead goes, and it says he was in secret. Now, that’s not going to remain the case, but that’s where the story starts. And here we have interesting details from John. The Jews are looking for him, saying where is he? And the crowd is complaining, or at least not a small part of the crowd is complaining. And a few said he’s a good man, but others said he’s deceiving the crowd.

00:02:11:25 – 00:02:31:23
Clint Loveall
And then a very interesting line, Michael. No one would speak openly for fear of the Jews. In other words, whichever team they’re on, he’s a good man or he’s not. Or he’s deceiving the crowd. They just want to stay away. They know that the religious leaders and when John says Jews, that’s who he has in mind. These would all be Jews.

00:02:31:28 – 00:02:44:53
Clint Loveall
When? When John says that he has in mind those religious leaders in the crowd knows that those religious leaders are wound up about Jesus, and it’s better to just stay out of their way and stay off the record.

00:02:44:58 – 00:03:04:23
Michael Gewecke
So this is a fascinating turn in the story. It is a little bit of a setup in the previous study that we had, and definitely like Clint said, go back and listen to that. But when you have people saying, hey, the most effective thing for you to do is to go show people who you are, right? Go, go, give them the signs, go teach them the lessons.

00:03:04:24 – 00:03:34:12
Michael Gewecke
And then here today, Jesus, instead of doing the thing that would make the most sense, he goes in secret. And there we almost get the sense that Jesus is the one hearing these things right. Jesus is amongst the crowd as there’s considerable complaining about these differing ways of understanding who he is. John. Once again, and not to sound like a broken record, but John is just upfront about the divisiveness of the revelation of Jesus Christ.

00:03:34:12 – 00:04:12:19
Michael Gewecke
John is not hiding that in any way, and it becomes abundantly clear in this gospel that Jesus is a divisive character that people are either able to see or they’re not. And I think what’s really striking here in the midst of this debate that John relates happening there, whether or not on one hand, Jesus is a good man or whether or not on the other that he’s deceiving the fact that they’re all being silenced because of the fear of the Jews only serves to increase our awareness of how turbulent Jesus’s relationship is with very influential Jews.

00:04:12:28 – 00:04:39:14
Michael Gewecke
Remember here he’s in at the festival in Jerusalem, so he’s at the center of Jewish power. And John in chapter seven is already portraying that Jesus has gotten crossways with the Jews we just had yesterday. He’s being sought to be killed. Here there’s already this very, very strong debate happening. And and John’s laying out for us, not just how some are repelled like a magnet.

00:04:39:14 – 00:04:47:40
Michael Gewecke
Some are brought to him, but many are repelled from him. And that Repellants is becoming even stronger as the story goes on.

00:04:47:45 – 00:05:16:32
Clint Loveall
Yeah. The I think it’s an important note that you added there, Michael. We’ve already been told that the Jews, these religious leaders, Jesus enemies growing in their animosity, were seeking to kill him. So he’s he’s on their radar, not as just a frustration, but as someone to be eliminated. And again, that that tension is now beginning to inform all of the tellings of the story and all of the crowd here.

00:05:16:37 – 00:05:41:30
Clint Loveall
So let me continue. Jump in here, verse 14, pick up another couple verses about the middle of the festival. Jesus went up into the temple and began to teach. The Jews were astonished, saying, how does this man have such learning when he’s never been taught? Then Jesus answered them, my teaching is not mine, but his him who sent me.

00:05:41:34 – 00:06:13:25
Clint Loveall
Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I’m speaking on my own. Those who speak on their own seek their own glory. But the one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true, and there is nothing false in him. So now we have another one of these moments with Jesus and the religious leaders, the Jews, having a conversation, a conflict, really it it starts well enough.

00:06:13:30 – 00:06:36:29
Clint Loveall
They are impressed by Jesus. At least they’re impressed by the depth of his knowledge. How did he learn such things? Remembering John Jesus always knows the back story of what people are thinking and saying. So Jesus answered them. They don’t necessarily say it to him, but Jesus answers them. This is not my teaching. It’s the one who sent me.

00:06:36:34 – 00:07:00:45
Clint Loveall
Anyone who seeks the will of God will know whether a teaching is from God or not. And it’s it would be easy to misread that and think that what Jesus is saying is that if we’re trying to be faithful, we have some discernment. I think it’s better to read it backwards and to say those who know Jesus is true, understand the teaching is from God.

00:07:00:45 – 00:07:30:09
Clint Loveall
I think John is not here trying to elevate our ability to discern. I think he’s trying to elevate Jesus and verify Jesus by the fact that those who are seeking God’s will know that, or encounter truth in the Christ in Jesus. Those who speak on their own seek their own glory. But the one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true, and there’s nothing false in him.

00:07:30:09 – 00:07:33:56
Clint Loveall
It’s interesting. Michael.

00:07:34:01 – 00:07:59:13
Clint Loveall
And I, I don’t know if I would have thought to say it this way, but one of the distinctive is, I think I see in the Gospel of John is the things that the faith would say about Jesus. John often is comfortable coming directly from Jesus. So we would we would as faith. People say Jesus doesn’t seek his own glory, but he seeks the glory of God who sent him.

00:07:59:18 – 00:08:20:38
Clint Loveall
And he is true. And there’s nothing false in him. But in John, John’s comfortable with Jesus saying those things about himself. I think that’s less true in the other gospels. Certainly a gospel like Mark, you’re not going to hear this language, but but John is comfortable with Jesus proclaiming things that the church would later proclaim about him. And I.

00:08:20:40 – 00:08:41:30
Clint Loveall
And I think, you know, that gives John a readable sense for people of faith. There’s not a lot of confusion here in the way say, well, you ask, well, why doesn’t Jesus want people to know who he is in Mark? That’s not here. This is Jesus saying things about himself that we would later come to agree with.

00:08:41:34 – 00:09:02:48
Michael Gewecke
If we could read this text with fresh eyes. I do think it is a challenging text, and this exists in this theme or this strand that runs throughout the Gospel of John. It’s very challenging when we have this idea that Jesus is the one who claims to be speaking for God. He’s literally here. The teaching is from God.

00:09:02:52 – 00:09:40:46
Michael Gewecke
And then there are those who seek their own glory. But but Jesus is the one who’s seeking to give glory to the one who sends him. This is very, very robust Christian theology, that this is intended to be a primer for our understanding as Christians in the generations to come. Right. John is explicit about the fact that we’re given this book to have enough information so that we can believe and the ways in which Jesus continues to teach, even if it is against the grain of the culture and against the grain of the religious leadership of Judaism at the time of his life.

00:09:40:51 – 00:10:09:27
Michael Gewecke
What Jesus is doing here is making a compelling case, as told through the Gospel of John, as to the fact that he is the Son of God doing the father’s will, while yet in the beginning of the gospel, saying that he is all at once a co-creator, he was with God from the very beginning that this combination of factors, the fact that Jesus speaks for God and in this case is not claiming to be God is in fact claiming to be teaching God’s will.

00:10:09:37 – 00:10:30:34
Michael Gewecke
And then at the beginning of the book made it very, very explicit that Jesus is indeed that God himself, that he’s been present since the creation. This is a holding intention of the church’s historic theology about the fact that Jesus is fully God, that Jesus is fully human. And yes, you could get this. There are snippets of this.

00:10:30:34 – 00:10:50:58
Michael Gewecke
There are breadcrumbs of this throughout the other gospels that exist. You can find them if you were going to look through it. But nowhere in Jesus’s voice. No place more clearly in terms of the consistent themes of the book is this kind of robust, nuanced theology present and I think that the church owes a great deal of our understanding of who Jesus says.

00:10:50:58 – 00:11:18:31
Michael Gewecke
Much of our creeds, much of our beliefs stem from this book. They stem from Jesus’s own teaching in red letters that we have in front of us. And I think, Clint, that makes this book eminently important. It also makes this book, in some ways less accessible in the sense that it’s not just the story of Jesus. There’s some deep lessons being taught in the midst of it, and we’ve got to stay awake, and we got to stay tuned if we’re going to see them.

00:11:18:36 – 00:11:50:35
Clint Loveall
I think one of the benefits of John is that the as we’ve just been saying, Michael, that John encapsulates what we would call Christology, in other words, our theology of Christ. John encapsulates that and clarifies it in a way that I think is more open ended in the other gospels. And that gives us, maybe in some ways the sharpest look at Jesus, theologically speaking.

00:11:50:40 – 00:12:09:11
Clint Loveall
Let’s go ahead and finish out the rest of this passage. Jesus continues to talk to the Pharisees or the Jewish leaders here. Did not Moses give you the law? Yet none of you keep the law. Why are you looking for an opportunity to kill me? The crowd answered, you have a demon who is trying to kill you.

00:12:09:16 – 00:12:35:17
Clint Loveall
Jesus answered. I performed one work and all of you were astonished. Moses gave you circumcision. It is, of course, not from Moses, but from the patriarchs. And you circumcise a man on the Sabbath. If a man receives circumcision on the Sabbath, in order that the law of Moses may not be broken, are you angry with me because I healed a man’s whole body on the Sabbath?

00:12:35:22 – 00:13:12:04
Clint Loveall
Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment. In every one of the gospels, we, as those who come later, get to listen in on some, arguments over the details of things that were known in Jesus day. These aren’t things that are very important to us or that play much of a role for us anymore. Things like whether they wash their hands on the Sabbath or whether there’s healings on the Sabbath, or in this case, an argument over circumcision, which becomes very big in, say, some of Paul’s letters, like Galatians.

00:13:12:09 – 00:13:33:20
Clint Loveall
But, but every gospel gives us a chance to try and enter in a few of these family arguments that Jesus has with Jewish leaders. And that’s what’s happening here. So the idea of circumcision is that you had to be circumcised. It was expected that a boy, a baby boy, would be circumcised on the eighth day of his life.

00:13:33:25 – 00:14:04:40
Clint Loveall
Now, as you probably know, there’s a prohibition of doing work on the Sabbath, which is Saturday in their culture. However, if a child is born on Friday of the preceding week, then there’s circumcision would fall on Sabbath, and they would be circumcised. It was understood that the Sabbath, the circumcision, was more important to to do on the eighth day than it was to prohibit that being done on the Sabbath.

00:14:04:40 – 00:14:26:45
Clint Loveall
And so Jesus is saying here, you know, you have this law that says, don’t do anything on the Sabbath, but you have another law that you follow that says it’s okay on the Sabbath. I heal the whole body, I may. I gave a person their life back. I changed a person’s reality and healed them completely. And you want to argue that it’s on the Sabbath.

00:14:26:45 – 00:14:50:20
Clint Loveall
You do a little thing on the Sabbath and you say, it’s okay. I do a life changing thing on the Sabbath, and you’re ready to kill me. And then there’s this line at the end do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment. And I there’s a sense in which I think, Michael, that that’s a good summary of a lot of Jesus conflicts.

00:14:50:20 – 00:15:23:27
Clint Loveall
Right. That when you strip it all down, what Jesus is saying is, look, if it’s not for your misinterpretation of things, you would be able to see that I’m doing good. I and I go further than that. I’m doing God’s work, I’m doing godly things. And because you won’t see that, because you’re wrapped up in your own stuff and misusing the law, you’re ready to have me branded as, a heretic and a blasphemer because you simply don’t get it.

00:15:23:27 – 00:15:26:31
Clint Loveall
And that fits well into John’s perspective.

00:15:26:36 – 00:15:56:10
Michael Gewecke
I think there’s another thing happening here that is really mind blowing, really honestly here. And notice that he’s referencing the man healed on the Sabbath, you might remember, and you’d have to go all the way back to the beginning of chapter five to find the story of the man by the pool of the cedar, who Jesus heals on the Sabbath day, and then you realize, whoa, whoa, whoa, aren’t we here now in the middle of chapter seven?

00:15:56:15 – 00:16:27:45
Michael Gewecke
So it’s been an entire selection now of stories, which this story is bookending. And that’s amazing that you begin to see that how carefully, John has constructed this telling of Jesus’s life, so that you can understand that the the revelation moment started by Jesus restoring this man’s body has gone through all of these conflicts and teachings and lack of revelation and abundance of revelation and debate and fight.

00:16:27:50 – 00:16:50:36
Michael Gewecke
And now we come right here to this unbelievably pithy statement, which you can now see sort of tying the bow around the whole package. And it’s amazing. Do not judge by appearances, but judge with righteous judgment. I don’t think that this is just a statement about morals. This isn’t just about what’s right and wrong. I think this is also about judge rightly about the appearance of the one standing in front of you.

00:16:50:36 – 00:17:20:15
Michael Gewecke
I think there’s a sense in which, theologically, John wants it to be clear that with right eyes, with right hearts, we can see and judge rightly about reality. What’s reality? That’s Jesus Christ, that’s his presence, that’s his restorative power. If you don’t see him, then you seek to kill him. Then you’re repelled by him, that you’re you’re set off on an entirely different path and the path that leads to death and violence and destruction.

00:17:20:25 – 00:17:43:24
Michael Gewecke
Because you are running from the source of life, you’re running from the one who restores. And when you run away from restoration, you run headlong into destruction. And John is portraying this through Jesus’s signs and miracles, right through the works he’s doing with real people. And also, I think one of the ways that we’ve said so often now, Clint, John also does it uniquely through the explicit teaching of Jesus.

00:17:43:24 – 00:17:58:32
Michael Gewecke
Those are always bound together as one. You always have the sign with the teaching. And to those who believe, it is a nourishment of the faith to those who disbelieve, it is simply ammunition towards the assumption that they made from the beginning. Yeah.

00:17:58:32 – 00:18:29:35
Clint Loveall
And and we want to follow here. I mean, this is there’s a boldness in this. Essentially, we get to the end of the story. Jesus says, judge with right judgment. And the clear implication is you’re using wrong judgment. You are wrong. Jesus is telling these experts in religion, the these men who are charged with and believe themselves capable of discerning the work of God, of understanding and interpreting the law.

00:18:29:40 – 00:19:06:34
Clint Loveall
These are men whose lives are centered in the practice of religion, and Jesus is saying to them in pretty clear words, you’re wrong about everything. You’re wrong about me. You’re wrong about the law. You’re wrong about yourselves. You’re wrong about God. It it’s easy to read a sentence like that and miss the offensiveness in it, but keep in mind, I mean, think about what Jesus is telling these people and think about how much these people don’t want to hear that, that that’s a bold that’s a bold thing that Jesus says, you are wrong.

00:19:06:34 – 00:19:14:01
Clint Loveall
You’re judging wrong. Your judgment can’t be trusted. And certainly that’s going to anger them.

00:19:14:06 – 00:19:59:16
Michael Gewecke
The way in which we see Jesus conduct himself in John is all at once clear and revelatory and also confusing and spiritually deep and the honesty with which he’s portrayed is, I think, an inspiration to how we, too, are called to live our lives of faith, to be able to give account with simple words to what we believe, while also having experienced and have the awareness of how deep this faith goes and how truly, endless the the extent of the revelation of Christ and the ways in which that nuances and fills our life with meaning and value.

00:19:59:16 – 00:20:14:24
Michael Gewecke
It’s all there at the same time. And John makes it clear that in Christ it’s been there since the beginning. Thanks for being with us. Hope that this has been helpful. Certainly I give this video like if you find it interesting, helpful, or maybe even challenging and do subscribe so you can stay with us as we go through stays like this.

00:20:14:33 – 00:20:25:13
Michael Gewecke
Clint. This text in many ways began in chapter five, and so subscribing gives you a way to stick with us as we go on long journeys through the gospel like that. We’ll see you tomorrow.

00:20:25:15 – 00:20:25:39
Clint Loveall
Thanks.