A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Jesus said to the Jews, I solemnly assure you, if a man is true to my word, he shall never see death. And the Jews retorted, now we know that you are possessed. The prophets are dead, yet you claim a man shall never know death if he keeps my word. Surely, you don't pretend to be greater than our father Abraham who died or the prophets who died, whom do you make yourself out to be anyway?
And Jesus answered, if I glorify myself, that glory comes to nothing. He who gives me glory is the father, the very one that you claim as your god, even though you do not know him, but I know him. Were I to say I do not know him, I would know be no better than you are liars. Yes. I know him well, and I keep his word.
Your father, Abraham, rejoiced that he might see my day, and he saw it and was glad. And at that, the Jews objected strenuously, you are not yet 50. How can you have seen Abraham? And Jesus answered, I solemnly declare it. Before Abraham came to be, I am.
At that, the Jews picked up rocks to throw at Jesus, to kill him, but he hid himself and slipped out of the temple precincts. And this is the good news of our lord according to Saint John. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. In view of the dramatic events of Holy Week, where you have the alleged son of God being treated as the most despised of a man of men. Apparently, without any power, forlorn and faint and stark, the church in these days is presenting us with text that try to tell us that this despicable character that will die on the cross is the son of God.
Because believe me, you have to have that affirmed. Now, I've been playing around a good bit for eight weeks with his with with Erasmus and Luther and Calvin and company. Now one of the great things that has come through to me about the Protestants, the great reformers, the first quarter of the sixteenth century is this, that they were bookish people. See, printing had just that is movable type had just come in at the end of the previous century, and the printing presses were turning out everything they could get a hold of, so that the written word had had apparently taken on tremendous power. And you see, the idea was, get the text out, get the books out, let people read, and that will save them culturally, religiously, in every old way.
This was the great theme of Erasmus. And I'm not exaggerating this, even if I'm a little flippant about it. Now, you see, one thing that the while the the Protestants disagreed, that is the the Protestants from Switzerland, Strasbourg, and then Luther in Germany around Saxony, while they diff differed among themselves, they did did agree on a number of things. One of them was about the bible as being the ultimate authority. They've thrown out the pope, they've thrown out the general counsels, they've thrown out everything except the written word, the word of God in the original Greek, if it's the New Testament.
And one of the greatest things that Luther did was to was his translation of the New Testament, which was Erasmus' work. He's the one who produced the first printed Greek testament, New Testament, was Luther's translation. Not that it was the first translation, but because of its vehemency, the emotional part of it, the elegance the the eloquence of the language. Now my point is this, one thing that anyone who's fiddled and fooled with languages, even in the original, and the problem is magnified enormously when you get into translations, is that you can find almost anything you want in the written word. You just take the whole controversy or the plural controversies about the Eucharist.
They come all back to the one tiny little word is, I s in English. What does it mean? Now, the point I want to make this morning is this, I don't believe that way in the written word. I am absolutely fearful of the written word. You can take three people and give them the same thing to read, and you'll get three different versions of what it says.
You can try it out. Take it try it at your dinner table tonight. This is a fact of life. So I ask if if these texts are supposed to see, what's back of my mind, and I hope you're thinking, is this idea that Christ didn't know he was God, see? That, that there was an evolution, that Christ didn't claim to be God.
It's something that sort of grew that he grew into it. Like a kid used to grow into long pans if they were boys. Now here's the point. When I ask what did Christ mean when he said this, let's forget the text as as words and say what did the what did the crowd think he was saying? Let them speak.
I've I've used this argument many times, and it means so much to me. Because I said, you deal with words, I know what words are. They're as slippery as eaves. But I ask you now, what did the crowd understand Christ to be saying? They spoke the same language, whatever it was.
See, we're not even sure the language that Christ spoke. We have the New Testament in Greek, that's for sure, but Christ didn't write the New Testament. So whatever language the man was using, his hearers heard it. What did they understand Christ to be saying here? Now let's not worry what they said.
What did they do about it? They picked up stones to kill him. Why? Varun. Porquah.
Why did they wanna kill him? He was speaking a lot of nonsense, saying that that before Abraham was, he was. How ridiculous can you get? The man was insane. Why did they wanna kill him?
You don't kill lunatics. Why did he pick up those stones to hurl at Jesus and destroy him? What did they understand him to be saying? Well, you know what they were under. That he was guilty of blasphemy.
That and what is blasphemy? It's making yourself out to be god almighty. That's what this so don't worry about what this little word says in the Greek or the Aramaic or or how Saint Jerome translated translated or what did Origen say about it? What did the mob, the crowd, the hearers, what did they think that Jesus was saying? They picked up stones to kill him.
Why? Because Because they understood that he was claiming to be God Almighty, and the penalty of that was death by stoning because you weren't allowed even to touch such a person with your hands. You stoned them. So here you to me, this is it is it's the same way about the the the words of our lord about the holy Eucharist. When he says this when he he said, unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you won't have life.
What did he mean? Well, a lot of the Protestants say he only meant what he said when I'm the gate. Well, did that was he a gate when he said I'm a gate? So I said it's just a metaphor. Is it a metaphor?
Is this a metaphor? When at the time of the eucharist when he says unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, and they left him. What did they understand to be did they understand it as a metaphor? So here, what do you have here? They picked up stones to destroy Jesus because they understood him to be claiming to be God almighty, and the penalty for that is death.
You can't escape that. It's impossible. You say, oh, yes. But you know the crowd, the mob, the hoi polloi, the demos. You can't trust them.
What can you all I can say is, if they made a mistake about this, who is to blame? Not the mob, but Jesus Christ. He would be the liar unless he happens to be what he claimed, son of god. In the name of the father and of the son and the holy spirit. Amen.