17 Pentecost
John 8:31-47
In today’s Gospel reading we find Jesus still at the Festival of Booths, and
still at the Temple teaching and disputing with the Pharisees. Once more, he makes a statement about who he is that they completely misunderstand. And once more, Jesus argues circles around them. Jesus has just told those in the crowd who were beginning to believe that he really was the promised Messiah that if they continued down this path, and continued in his word, then they would know the truth and the truth would set them free.
But what the Pharisees heard was the implication that they were not free. And this upset them. So they jumped into the conversation. ‘We are Abraham’s children,’ they said, ‘we have always been free.’
Now, we will overlook the irony that they were at a festival celebrating being set free from several centuries of slavery in Egypt, or that their ancestors had only a few centuries ago returned from captivity in Babylon. In their view, they had always been free spiritually as Abraham’s children. And didn’t like what Jesus was implying.
So Jesus tells them that they certainly are not Abraham’s children. If they were, they would be doing what Abraham did and following God. Instead, they are trying to kill Jesus.
Then the Pharisees argue that they have only one true Father and that is God himself. And Jesus points out that if God were their Father, they would love Jesus, because he has come down to them from God.
Then Jesus suggests a third alternative as to their parentage. If they are not Abraham’s children because they are trying to kill Jesus, and if they are not God’s children because they do not love and accept the truth that God is among them, then that leaves one option. They must be the children of the devil, because he was a murderer from the beginning and the father of lies.
This stops them in their tracks, and as we will see in next week’s reading, they quickly try to change the subject.
But this whole discussion about whose children the Pharisees are is a distraction. The main topic of John chapters seven and eight to this point has been the question of who Jesus is. And that remains the case in today’s text as well.
To see this we need to go back to the start of this present debate and look at what Jeus said that sent the Pharisees so off tract.
What Jesus said was this: ‘You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.’
These are words I think we are all familiar with, and not just from our reading of John’s Gospel.
I remember the first time I heard them.
I was in year six, and was what you might politely describe as a behaviorally challenged child. I was in my first year of middle school and we had moved, together with the high school students, to a brand-new building. But neither the new building to the promotion out of primary school made school seem any less pointless. So I found every way possible to entertain myself and to make the days pass more quickly so I could go home and go fishing. One day a once in a childhood opportunity presented itself. A car had hit a skunk just down the road from the school. We had all smelt it coming in on the bus. For those of you unfamiliar with skunks, they emit an extraordinarily repugnant odour when threatened that one can smell from quite a distance and which lingers for some time.
During lunch break I decided to gather together a small group of like-minded students to help me enact the most brilliant plan ever. The idea was to find a long limb, pick up the skunk while holding our noses, come back the school, and fling the skunk onto the school roof next to the large mushroom shaped ventilation fans than brough fresh air into the school. In the end I should have simply acted along. My companions were too afraid to pick up the dead skunk, even with a long branch. So I had to do this myself and carry the skunk back to the school. Once there they all said that it would be impossible to get it up two stories onto the roof. Basic physics, however, suggested the length of the limb would provide sufficient leverage and speed to get the carcass onto the roof. So I decided to have the first go myself to show that it was possible. Perhaps it was a lucky fling, but the skunk left the end of the branch in a perfect trajectory toward the school roof and the two large air intact vents. I waited for congratulations and praise. Or at least an admission that I was right. But when I turned back to my friends they were all running as fast as they could. So I ran too.
The bell rang and we returned to class, waiting for the smell of skunk to fill the school. Nothing happened. For twenty minutes nothing happened. They a girl near the side of room near the vents said, ‘What’s that smell?’ Soon others were asking the same question. Then the teacher announced it was skunk. She moved us into the hallway to get away from the smell but it was there to. Soon other classes were emptying into the hallway. Within a few minutes 600 hundred students were being ushered to the school oval. About half an hour later the buses were called and we were sent home early. I spent the rest of the day fishing.
The level of my success, as a lowly year six, was astounding.
The next day I was summed to the principal’s office. In the room next door to his office I could see several of the ‘friend’s’ who had been with me two days earlier. None of them looked up at me. I knew they had given me up.
But the principal seemed convinced that a confession was needed. ‘Just tell the truth,’ he said. ‘The truth will set you free.’ I had nothing to lose, so I told the truth. And do you know what? The truth didn’t set me free. Unless you consider two weeks’ suspension and a family meeting with principal being set free.
So what went wrong? I told the truth and was promised it would set me free.
Well, to begin with, both the principal and myself were lousy biblical scholars. We had misunderstood these words of Jesus as badly as the Pharisees had misunderstood them when Jesus first spoke them.
Despite all the lines from movies and all the times in police interviews this line from Jesus has been used, it was never meant to suggest that telling the truth will set you free from punishment. In fact, the saying has nothing at all to do with telling the truth – though telling the truth is generally a good thing. Nor does it have anything to do with being set free from punishment.
This is what Jesus actually said. ‘If you continue in my word, you are my disciples; and you will know the truth (not tell the truth) and the truth will set you free.’ (v. 32).
And in case anyone had missed the point, Jesus goes on in verse 36 to stay ‘if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.’
The first mistake we often make when we hear these words is that we miss the fact that it is the Son, Jesus, who is the truth. Recall also John 14:6 when Jesus declares ‘I am the Way, the truth and the life.’ We do not set ourselves free by telling the truth. But we are set free by knowing the truth, that is, by knowing Jesus. It is Jesus who sets us free. And he can do this because of who he is, the only Son of the Father. Chapters seven and eight in John’s Gospel, in which Jesus is teaching and disputing with the Pharisees and priests in the Temple during the Festival of Booths, is all about the question of who Jesus is.
In today’s text, Jesus takes that question a bit further. We learn that Jesus is the truth, and that he is the one who sets us free.
The second way we misunderstand this text is that we think it is talking about being set free from some sort of punishment or perhaps imprisonment. But it is sin which we are being set free from – sin which rules in us and drives us. But when Jesus sets us free it is now the Son who is the guiding power in our lives, not our sinful desires. For Jesus has truly set us free.
The words of Jesus in today’s text are not about the importance of telling the truth. They are bigger than that. They are about knowing the Truth. And that truth is Jesus. If we know Jesus, then, and understand and accept the truth of who he is – God in flesh with us and for us – then it is Jesus who sets us free. And what he sets us free from is ourselves. From our own enslavement to our self-centredness, and all of our wrong thoughts and actions. Jesus sets us free to longer be bound up in our sinful desires, but to follow him. And as he tried to explain to the Pharisess, ‘if the Son sets us free, then we are truly free.’
Amen.
Pastor Mark Worthing.
Port Macquarie.