A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Jesus said to the Jews, my father is at work until now, and I am at work as well. Now listen. What did they understand Jesus to be saying? That is his hearers.
The reason that the Jews were even more determined to kill Jesus was that he not only was breaking the Sabbath, that is curing these people on the Sabbath and telling them to take up their beds and walk, But worse still, he was speaking of god as his own father. Now that wasn't too bad. But now listen, thereby making himself god's equal. And this was our lord's answer. I solemnly assure you, the son cannot do anything by himself.
He can do only what he sees the father doing. For whatever the father does, the son does likewise. For the father loves the son, and everything the father does, he shows him. Yes. To your great wonderment, he will show him even greater works than these.
Indeed, just as the father raises the dead and grants life, so the son grants life to those to whom he wishes. The father himself judges no one, but has assigned all judgment to the son so that all men may honor the son just as they honor the father. He who refuses to honor the son refuses to honor the father who sent him. I solemnly assure you, the man who hears my word and has faith in him who sent me possesses eternal life. He does not come under condemnation but has passed from death to life.
I solemnly assure you, an hour is coming. Indeed, it has come. When the dead shall hear the voice of god's son, and those who have heeded it shall live. Just as the father possesses life in himself, so has he granted it to the son to have life in himself. The father has given over to him power to pass judgment because he is son of man.
No need for you to be surprised at all of this, for an hour is coming in which all those in the tombs shall hear his voice and come forth. Those who have done right shall rise to live, and evildoers shall be condemned. I cannot do anything of myself. I judge as I hear, and my judgment is honest because I am not seeking my own will but the will of him who sent me. And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. And if you think I understood everything I read to you at this time, you are mistaken. There is lots here I do not grasp or understand because this is Saint John, and Saint John has his own way of writing. Some call it poetic, and I leave poetry to the poets with my blessing.
But there is something in today's reading that I grasp perfectly. Any lawyer would grasp it. Anybody who has anything to do with evidence will grasp it. But before mentioning that, I want to point out why do we have this reading this morning. It's difficult for us, you know, to realize today that in the earlier days of the church, say the first three or four hundred years of the church, there were good, honest, religious, devout people who couldn't bring themselves to admit that the son of god ever took a body because they looked upon the body as something evil, Saint Augustine and his Manichae.
They couldn't admit that the son of god that the that that god could allow his creatures to treat him as we are told he was treated in the New Testament. Now they didn't deny that this happened. Oh, no. But they said that that now this is going to make strike you as really outrageous or startling, but they said that the that the body of Christ was simply a phenomenon. It was an illusion.
Well, of course, this is you know, we say, how crazy can you get? This is nonsense. You're making god out to be a liar. But they were called the Gnostics. And there are plenty of people today, I've had them tell me, don't it isn't important to me whether Christ rose from the dead physically.
What's important is his spiritual resurrection, whatever that means. Because this I guess I'll put that in the same category as poetry. Now let's come back to this. The church is aware of this. The church is old.
We belong to a century old institution that goes back to Jesus Christ. Don't ever forget it. We weren't born in the sixteenth century. If if god almighty waited until Luther came on the scene to set us straight on the track of religion, I blame god for everything that's happened. Of course, I do.
He was very he was very negligent. We belong to the tradition that goes back to Jesus Christ, the son of Mary. Every mass we begin, we we say, son of god and son of Mary. Why do you think the church is hitting that so hard? Because some people can't admit that god became man, and neither can I?
If you sit down quietly and think about it, you say, this is impossible. Well, it happened. It happened. God became man and was a son, a child of a woman named Mary. It happened.
And the church realizes that she's got to keep us on the track telling us who is the son of Mary. Who is this Jesus Christ? Did he know he was the son of God? There are some that that people day say he didn't. And so that's why the church is giving us this long passage from Saint John, which has a lot of mysterious things in it for me.
But there's one thing that isn't mysterious at all, and that's this plain fact that you can't get out of, that our lord's hearers, the people who surrounded him, not only on this occasion, but on other occasions, but this is one of the most articulate of the occasions. What did they think that Jesus was telling them? What did they think that Christ claimed to be? What what impression did they get? And then if you look at it in another way, if they got a false impression because it was created by Christ, then who's to blame for it?
And then you tell me that Christ was a just a good man who could mislead millions and millions of people? So we come, what did the hearers of Christ understand him to me? Were his words ambiguous? Were they allegorical? Were they metaphorical?
Were they poetic? Or did they take him literally? The answer is look at the cross. There's the answer. It's written right there.
That's the answer. Because when Christ was brought before Pilate and he says, what charge do you bring against this man? They brought two charges. First one, he made himself out to be god. And the second, he claimed to be a king.
You see, so that that our lord's Jewish enemies had our lord on both prongs of the fork. They had no jurisdiction over Christ as far as his politics are concerned. That was the Romans' deal. But everything pertaining to religion, the the Romans left to the Jews. So it was the Jews who said this man is guilty of blasphemy because he made himself out to be god.
How did they know it? Because Christ had told them that by word and by deed. And they were good Jews, and blasphemy is the worst possible crime. They had that much sense. And so when they hailed Christ before Pilate, he claimed to be god.
Blasphemy is guilty of death by our law. And then, of course, to get the Romans on their side, he said he claimed to be a king. Well, you can't have two kings. That's one thing Caesar disliked very much. He didn't like to have other kings around him.
So our blessed lord was on a two pronged fork. He was a blasphemer, and he was an anarchist. Was condemned by by the law of the Jews. He stood charged and condemned before the Roman law. But the point I wanna make is not that he claimed to be a king, but that he claimed to be the son of god.
In the name of the father, of the son, and holy spirit. Amen.