Resurrection Lutheran Church, St Catharines

“How long will you keep us in suspense? If You are the Christ, tell us plainly” (John 10:24). Well, I spot three places in today’s reading where Jesus does tell them plainly in this exchange between Himself and the Jews. Jesus said, quite plainly: “I and the Father are One” (v. 30); “I said, ‘I am the Son of God’” (v. 36); and “the Father is in Me and I am in the Father” (v. 38). These are among the clearest and plainest statements of Jesus in all of the Bible that He is God. And the Jews were incensed, ready to stone Him to death. They understood His plain meaning. They said to Jesus, “It is not for a good work that we are going to stone You but for blasphemy, because You, being a man, make Yourself God” (v. 33).

 

In order to fully understand the ire of the Jews and their violent reaction on this occasion, you have to pay attention to the time reference that John gives at the beginning of the reading: “At that time the Feast of Dedication took place at Jerusalem” (v. 22). The Feast of Dedication is not one of the big three that were instituted by God on Mount Sinai (Unleavened Bread and Passover; Pentecost; and Tabernacles or Booths). The Feast of Dedication was established in the period of time between the last of the prophets we have in the Old Testament and the beginning of the life of Jesus, which came about 400 years later when the record of the Gospels of the New Testament pick up the history. The Feast of Dedication was instituted about 150 years before the birth of Jesus.

 

This reference to the Feast of Dedication in John 10 is the only place in our English Protestant bibles that mentions what we recognize from it’s Hebrew title, the Feast of Hanukkah. If you have a bible that includes what we call the books of the Apocrypha, as Martin Luther’s German translation of the bible had them, then you can read in 1 Macabbees about the events that took place which led to the establishment of this Feast of Dedication.

 

Somewhat briefly, after the death of Alexander the Great, the rule of Judea was among the responsibilities given to King Antiochus IV. He decreed that Greek culture should be established in all of his dominion and a great number of the Jews went along with that. But then Antiochus got more than a little crazed about this Hellenization. He ransacked the temple in Jerusalem and took all of the gold items out of the Holy Place. He constructed a new altar over top of the temple’s altar of burnt offering and had pagan priests sacrifice all kinds of unclean animals upon it. He outlawed the practice of the Jewish religion and anyone caught doing so was to be put to death. He took for Himself the name Antiochus, God Manifest, and printed it upon all his coins.

 

A member of the true priestly family of the Jews, Judas Macabbeus, led a revolt and after a few miraculous victories under the hand of the LORD, they were able to win back control of Jerusalem and clean out all of the pagan stuff from the temple. Then they reconsecrated the space and rededicated it to the worship of the one true God. They established a feast in order to commemorate this consecration and re-dedication of the temple: Hanukkah, the Feast of Dedication.

 

It was at this feast and within the temple courts that Jesus spoke plainly, saying things very similar to what Antiochus IV had said about 150 years earlier: that He was God manifest in the flesh. The Jews remembered the horrible conditions and the abominations under Antiochus and they were not going to tolerate anyone else desecrating their temple or taking the people away from their religious practices. That is why they were so incensed with Jesus on this occasion that they accused Him of blasphemy and took up stones to stone Him to death right then and there.

 

As commendable as it is for the Jews to defend the worship of the one true God and prevent the kind of persecution and suffering that the people experienced in their history connected to this Feast of Dedication, there are at least three points of irony that they got terribly wrong. All three of them are evident in their statement to Jesus, “It is not for a good work that we are going to stone You but for blasphemy, because You, being a man, make Yourself God” (v. 33).

 

The most obvious of the three is the last: their ironic statement that Jesus, being a man, makes Himself God. We know that the exact opposite is the case. The eternal, divine, Son of God made Himself man. It was not the other way around. Jesus had spoken plainly to them: “I and the Father are One.” They together are one eternal God. There was not a time when He was not God. He did not make Himself God, neither did God the Father make Jesus God. The Son of God was always God, being begotten of the Father from eternity. There was no moment of time when there was not Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

 

This eternal Son of God made Himself man. That is the way it went. In fulfillment of the promises of God throughout history, beginning with His promise in the garden of Eden when mankind first fell (Genesis 3:15), God became man, took on human flesh and blood, was born the seed of a woman (Galatians 4:4), became incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary (Luke 1:35). God became man in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus did not become God at some point in His life, like at His baptism, or His transfiguration. He is God from eternity.

 

The works and the words of Jesus which revealed that He was God are not things that made Him God. They are the proofs that He is God. The Jews thought Jesus was using these works and words to make something of Himself in the eyes of the people. But His works of compassion and healing toward His fellow man, were not steps up a ladder toward divinity. They were displays of the compassionate heart of God combined with His almighty, divine power by which He created the world and gave life to mankind.

 

Another point of irony, perhaps not so obvious as what we just expounded, has to do with the fact that the Jews had stones in hand ready to shed Jesus’ blood right there in the temple courtyard. They were so inflamed with rage over Jesus’ teaching which would replace the religious rites being performed at the temple with some other kind of worship, that the Jews were ready to defile that very temple precinct with the blood of their murderous act, and have a dead body lie right there on the pavement in Solomon’s Colonnade. That is exactly what the troops of Antiochus did when they ransacked the Holy Place 150 years prior, and killed all the priests and Levites who tried to stop them.

 

Perhaps another level to this irony is that the blood of Jesus does not make anything unclean, unlike the blood of a dead man’s body. Rather, like the blood of the sacrifices instituted by God, made holy by contact with God at the altar, Jesus’ holy blood, the blood of God, is a blood of cleansing and purification. In his first epistle, John the Evangelist tells us that “the blood of Jesus... cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7).

 

It is by the blood of Jesus that we are purified to enter into the Holy Place of God’s presence (Hebrews 10:19). It is the blood of Jesus that we receive in the Lord’s Supper that forgives our sins and sanctifies us to be righteous in God’s sight. The blood that was shed upon the cross for our redemption, the blood of this God made man, makes us acceptable to be in the presence of God to receive His gifts of blessing and to render to Him our thanks and praise.

 

Jesus was no threat of defilement to the temple. In fact, within the exchange with the Jews (that is in our reading tonight), Jesus identified Himself as “Him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world” (v. 36). While the Jews were celebrating the Feast of the reconsecration of a defiled altar, One stood before them who was consecrated by the Father to be the place of the one sacrifice that would atone for the sins of the world.

 

Furthermore, Jesus has made it clear throughout the Gospel of John that He is the true temple of God. He told them, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). We are given the explanation: “He was speaking of the temple of His body. When therefore He was raised from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this...” (v. 21-22). We have that temple of the body of Jesus presented to us in the Lord’s Supper to take and eat when we gather to worship.

 

The old temple of the Jews, rededicated as it was after the desecration by Antiochus, had fulfilled its purpose. It was the place of God’s presence with His people until the Son of God came in the flesh. From that point Jesus’ body is the true temple of God and if His people were to worship God, they would have to follow Jesus out of the temple and gather around His body given into death for their salvation. The Church of God, composed of Jews who followed Jesus out of the temple, and Gentiles whom He had drawn to Himself through the glory of His cross, worship God by gathering around the body of Jesus given in the Lord’s Supper.

 

A third instance of irony in that statement of the Jews, “It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because You, being a man, make Yourself God” (v. 33) is that it is not Jesus who is guilty of blasphemy. His words and works uphold the glory and majesty of God. It was the Jews who opposed Jesus who were guilty of defaming the name of the One true God. The Jews were saying of God (that is, Jesus,) that He is merely a man. They were saying that God was liar when He gave promises of the coming of Jesus, and that as Jesus spoke of the fulfillment of these promises in His coming, He was lying about God’s most glorious work for His people.

 

In John, chapter 10, where our text is found, Jesus spoke of His work as that of a shepherd. Throughout the Old Testament and particularly through the prophet Ezekiel, God said that He would be the One shepherd to lead and care for His people, His flock. When Jesus asked the Jews to believe in Him because of the works that He did, He spoke about His work as the shepherd of His people. “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of My hand” (vv. 27-28).

 

As God, the One faithful shepherd of Israel, Jesus came to lead His people by His voice. If they heard His voice, they would follow Him as He leads them out to the pastures of eternal life. From where was Jesus leading them out? He led them out from the temple, which the Jews had allowed to become less about God’s presence with them and more about their works to prove themselves holy. For the very thing of which they accused Jesus (that being a man He made Himself God), God had pronounced His condemnation upon the Jews. They sought to be children of God by making themselves holy through religious works.

 

Our shepherd continues to lead us out from the faulty temples that we erect for ourselves, temples that are built to show how holy we can make ourselves through the works that we do. Jesus did not do works to make Himself God. His works showed that He was God. So, likewise, if Jesus is the temple at which we worship, if His body sacrificed upon the cross is the place where we gather, then it is He who makes us holy and children of God and our works are only the proofs of (not the means by which) we are His children.

 

We need a faithful shepherd to keep leading us out of the idolatry of the worship of our works and to the green pastures of eternal life that are only found by following the voice of Jesus. It is His voice speaking plainly that proclaims that He and the Father are One; that He is the Son of God; that the Father is in Him and He is in the Father; and, therefore, that the sacrifice of His body upon the cross is the only source of consecration for us to come into God’s presence and to receive His blessing. May this plain speaking of our good Shepherd lead us in repentance out of pride in our works to faith in His bodily sacrifice.