sermon notes from the Vineyard Church of Milan 05/15/2011
(thanks to Shane Hipps at Mars Hill Bible Church for the inspiration – and some key ideas! - for this message)
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. 2The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. 3We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. 4We write this to make our joy complete.
1 John 1v1-4
Here’s the basic idea in this passage. There is something that always has been and always will be. And even though it is powerful and ever present, it is easy to miss, to be ignorant of; and in our ignorance, to never ever truly experience it. Nonetheless, some people have heard of it, seen it, inspected it, and held its weight in their hands, felt its texture, its temperature, its strength. And these people have made it their mission to bring others into this same awareness of this now uncovered reality, so that they and we and God can share together in it. Because it is in the sharing in it that joy finds fulfillment among us.
What is this something? It is life. Not just any kind of life. The greek word for it in 1 John is “zoe.” A particular kind of life that we will talk about in more detail. Eternal life, as it’s described here, a life that has been revealed in Jesus, a life that Jesus shows us and makes possible for us and offers to us and gives us, a life that isn’t just for later, but for right now, a life that is meant to be known and experienced even today.
In fact, there is so much to discover about this life, so many implications of it for our present lives and hurting world – that we will spend a few weeks exploring it together.
Let’s begin by setting some context. The book of 1st John is written to a particular community of Jesus followers some time after the death and resurrection of Jesus (perhaps in what is now modern day turkey / explain spread of Christianity). And this particular community has particular ways of understanding and talking about who Jesus is and what it means to follow him and what it is he has done to fling wide the doors to a new kind of life, life that can transform the world.
To understand this, especially if you are new to the Bible, it may help to realize that the Bible you hold in your hands is not in fact a single book, but a collection of books compiled and organized many years after the letter of 1st John was written. Some of these “books” were more like history accounts, some were more like collections of poems or songs, some were more like biographies, some were books of law or instruction, some were letters, and so on. Some of these books were written many, many years before 1st John, some were written after, some were written around the same time, but to different groups of people.
In the early church, not every community of Jesus’ followers scattered throughout the Roman empire would have had access to all of the same writings. It took years and years for things written to one part of the world to make their way to other parts of the world. So it wasn’t uncommon for any individual church or local community of churches to have access to only a very limited selection of the books we have today.
The community to whom the letter of 1st John was written may have never read or heard some of the books that we have in our Bibles. The community of disciples to whom 1st John was written, in fact, was probably a community whose faith, and way of talking about Jesus and faith and way of understanding Jesus and faith, was shaped primarily by just one book from what we call the New Testament, the gospel of John.
There are four books in our Bibles – the gospels - that describe the life of Jesus and explain who he is and what he is up to in the world. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the “synoptic” gospels because they all take a similar approach to telling the good news about Jesus. “syn” means together, and “optic” has seen, because these three accounts of the good news, the gospel, can be “seen together.” They contain many of the same stories, parables, even word for word phrasings in certain passages. They have a strong emphasis, each of them in their own way, on Jesus’ message of “the Kingdom of God” or as it’s described in Matthew’s gospel, “the Kingdom of Heaven.”
The gospel of John, though, is very different. It tells the same story of the same Jesus, but it does it in a very different way, using different kinds of language and structure. There are no parables in the gospel of John, for example. It uses much more poetic, abstract language than some of the other gospels, even a more sophisticated Greek vocabulary. And, it rarely speaks about Jesus’ message of the Kingdom of God. Instead, it talks over and over about Jesus’ message of eternal life.
This gospel, the gospel of John, is the gospel that shaped the community to whom the letter of 1st John is written. In fact, the letters of 1st, 2nd and 3rd John can be seen as commentaries to the gospel of John. Pastoral letters to people in the churches who came to faith in Jesus through the witness of John’s gospels, helping them to understand and clarify and apply what they had heard through the gospel of John.
To make a little clearer what we’re talking about, listen again to how this letter starts.
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. 2The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. 3We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. 4We write this to make our joy complete.
This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.
1 John 1v1-5
Now listen to how the gospel of John starts, and a couple of other statements from it…
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was with God in the beginning. 3Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4In him was life, and that life was the light of all people. 5The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
John 1v1-5
Then later, John quotes Jesus as saying:
I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.
John 15v11
These [words] are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
John 20v31
Beginning, word, life, light, life, darkness, joy, son, fellowship (in), life... This matters to us because the gospel of John will help us understand John’s first letter, and John’s first letter will help us understand the gospel of John. This matters to us because we are hungry for life - aren’t we? - and both John’s first letter and the gospel of John are all about Jesus’ message, or word, of life.
Practical Tip 1:
Go on a life hunt. [Go through the gospel of John and underline or note down or highlight every reference to “life” or “eternal life” and then read through 1st John 1v1-4 again to see what God might help you understand.]
So let’s dig in and start to see what’s going on here as 1st John gets the party started…
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.
Sometimes it is assumed that John is talking about Jesus here when he talks about that which was from the beginning, what we’ve heard, touched, etc. And in a way, surely he is. But if we leave that assumption unexamined, we’ll miss something really important.
You’ll notice that your Bible capitalizes “Word.” This is because John’s gospel talks about Jesus as the “Word” or “logos” of God, and so the translators make the determination that John is doing the same thing here. Which isn’t a bad thing in and of itself; it’s just that it makes the passage lose some of it’s poetic punch, and may get our noses sniffing down the wrong trail. Because there is no capitalization in the Greek that John uses to write this letter, so it isn’t necessarily the case that the logos of life here couldn’t also be translated “the message of life,” or the “message about life.” Similarly, in the next sentence the translators say “The life appeared…” which would make sense if they are talking about a person, Jesus. But the word they translate “appeared” might better be translated “was revealed.”
In other words, this life that John is talking about, this life that he has heard, seen, touched, this life he wants to proclaim a message about, this life was revealed to him – in and through Jesus, no doubt – but it’s the message of this life that he wants us to know and understand.
It may seem that we’re splitting hairs here that don’t need to be split, so let me tell you why I think this might really matter to us.
First, we need to understand that there is only one word for life in English, but there are two words for life used by John when he is writing his letters and his gospel. And they mean related, but fundamentally different things.
Take John 12v25, for example.
Those who love their life will lose it, while those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
The word for life in the first two instances is “psuche”. Which literally means breath, and is connected to the physical, embodied, biological life we all know and love – or don’t love, depending on how things are going. It can also be translated soul, to encompass the whole of our natural and spiritual lives. It is a general term for life that gets at the life all of us experience in varying quality. Psuche has a beginning – it starts when start breathing (at least in the ancient world view; a modern world-view might suggest that it starts at conception) - and ends when we stop breathing. Psuche can be threatened, thrown away, taken from us, defended, striven after, destroyed. It can be really great, and it can really be a struggle. It can have ups and it can have downs. (We can be psyched about psuche, and psuche can be sucky…)
Well, psuche’s like a road that you travel on
There's one day here and the next day gone
Sometimes you bend, sometimes you stand
Sometimes you turn your back to the wind
Psuche’s a highway, and I wanna ride it all night long…
So psuche life is one kind of life. But it’s not the only kind.
The word for life at the end of the sentence, preceded by the word “eternal”, is not “psuche”. It’s “zoe.” Zoe life, as John uses the term, often in connection with the adjective eternal, is something bigger than, and more powerful than, psuche life. You might call it the life that gives life to life, that gives life, life. Zoe life is the life of God, the life of the age to come, the life that all other life flows from.
Zoe life is life that doesn’t have a beginning and doesn’t have an end. Zoe life can intersect with time and space, but it’s not bound by it. Time and space is not where it has its home, because it’s outside of time. In the past, zoe life is. In the future, zoe life is. In the present, zoe life is. You might say zoe life is all is-ness.
Zoe can’t be threatened, can’t be thrown away, can’t be taken from us, doesn’t need to be defended or striven after, it can’t be destroyed.
And because zoe is the life of God, the life of his kingdom, the life of the age to come, it is the life at the heart of joy. It is life with joy at its heart.
[perhaps you’ve seen someone with zoe life at work within them…? Perhaps you’ve felt the limitations and insufficiency of psuche life…?]
And so when Jesus says:
Those who love their life will lose it, while those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
…what he’s getting at is that if you hold your psuche life, your breath, the concerns of this present life as your highest value, you will lose it. But if you hate (which doesn’t mean, for our purposes in this context, “dislike intensely,” but rather something more like “are willing to part with in preference for something better”) your psuche life, you’ll discover the zoe life underneath it, sustaining it.
When Jesus says the good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep in John 10, he’s referring to psuche life. But when he says he came that we might have life, and have it in abundance, or to the full, he’s referring to zoe life.
Practical Tip 2:
Choose zoe-life over psuche-life. [Our lives are full of day to day concerns. Going to work. Raising kids. Taking care of relationships. Houses. Cars. Paying bills. Dealing with injuries, sickness, problems of all sorts. These are our psuche lives. We can attempt to protect them and preserve them and defend them at all costs. In so doing we will surely become anxious, fearful, selfish, and eventually even willing to hurt others. To such an extent that all the joy will be drained of our psuche lives. Or, we can reorient our focus on the zoe life Jesus reveals to us, trusting Jesus that if we seek first his kingdom (which is just another way of speaking of eternal zoe), all of these psuche life things will cared for by God himself.
So work is no longer a matter of “how can I make the most money and get ahead the furthest and make my life better” but rather “how can I do this work in a way that pleases the God who will reward me with more zoe than I can possibly imagine.” Raising kids is no longer a matter of “how can I give my kids the best possible psuche life and/or at the same time maximize my experience of psuche life while raising them” but rather “how can I help my kids know and experience zoe life while I trust God to provide for their psuche life.” Taking care of relationships is no longer a matter of “how can make sure I am making everyone around me happy” but rather “how can I go to Jesus for living water so that I have a stream of living water welling up to eternal zoe in me for others to drink from.” Or perhaps it’s no longer a matter of “how can I protect myself from harm in this relationship or that relationship” but rather “how can I repent or forgive or offer favor to repair damage that’s been done, knowing it might cost me psuche life, but gain me zoe life.” And on and on.]
The thing about Jesus is that he is God himself born into a human body. Zoe life, the life of the ages, life without beginning and end, life that cannot be threatened, life filled with joy and joy filled with life took on flesh and blood and lived the same psuche life that we live. Breathed the same air, had all the same up and down experiences. But all the while, he was shining light for us on a deeper kind of life, on the kind of life that was within him, shaping and sustaining and transforming his psuche life. Zoe life.
Zoe that he said he came to give us.
Zoe that he said he desired for us to know and enjoy and be shaped by and sustained by and transformed by.
Zoe that was from the beginning and was near and at hand and yet was still coming in its fullness.
Zoe that is a gift from our loving Father, and the birthright of the children of God.
Zoe - that even when his psuche was taken from him, offered as a sacrifice on the cross for our sake - Zoe gave birth to resurrection, to zoe and resurrected psuche married together, inseparable, incorruptible.
So, now, back to our text:
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the message of zoe. 2The zoe was revealed; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal zoe, which was with the Father and has been revealed to us. 3We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. 4We write this to make our joy complete.
Do you see how this matters? John isn’t just saying he’s seen zoe life in Jesus, and so he knows it’s a possibility for human beings. Nor is John telling us zoe life is just an abstract concept off in the distance. No, John is saying they’ve experienced it already (heard! Seen! Looked at! Touched!), and they are telling us about it so that we can experience it too.
[like a baby…]
Zoe can vibrate the air around us so that our ears can hear it. Light can reflect off of it so that our eyes can perceive its quality and characteristics. It will even present itself for inspection, for examination, allowing us to consider it, contemplate it, attend to it with our eyes. And then, yes, we can also hold it in our hands. Cradle it, embrace it, welcome it, possess it, perhaps even join Jesus in giving it away to others.
This is the zoe we will explore more next week.
Practical Tip 3:
Go all CSI on some ZOE. Identify somebody who seems to have zoe life fueling their psuche life. Talk to other people about them. Watch them. Ask them questions, if they’ll let you. See what you can unearth about the sources of zoe life within them, the ways in which they’ve loosened their grip on psuche life to touch zoe life. See what you can imitate, try on for size.
No comments:
Post a Comment