Monday, December 29, 2014

Monday, December 29, 2014

John 7:37-52

The festival in this passage was the Feast of Tabernacles or Sukkot. This big fall harvest festival drew all of the people together for seven days. Strict observance required that people make a temporary shelter and live in it for the duration, representing time in the wilderness after the delivery from Egypt. The shelter helped people reflect on their helplessness and dependence on God. At first, Jesus declines to go, since his time is not at hand, but when his disciples leave for Jerusalem, he attends secretly. 

Unfortunately for Jesus, there was no such thing as secretly. He was spotted and reported to the chief priests of the temple. On the last day of the feast, he stands in public and declares:

“Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me,
as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”

There is no scripture using those words. Jesus is likely talking about the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, which John explains had not yet happened. (See Joel 2:28-29; Isaiah 44:3 and Isaiah 55:1-13) 

Some in the crowd thought he was the Prophet. Some believed he was the Messiah. Gossipers in the streets debated whether anyone from Galilee could be the Messiah. The Messiah had to be from David’s line and come from Bethlehem. So the crowd was not sure whether to seize him or honour him.

The temple guards reported this to the chief priests who wondered why Jesus was not brought in for questioning. And here we have the heart of the issue. The guards heard Jesus speak in person. Their reaction is profoundly different from that of the chief priests. A respected elder such as Nicodemus asks “Does our law condemn a man without first hearing him to find out what he has been doing?” But the chief priests insult and mock Nicodemus too. They are far too locked into the notion that no prophet can come from Galilee. They have condemned a man they have not yet met.

“No one ever spoke the way this man does,” the guards replied.

“You mean he has deceived you also?” the Pharisees retorted.
“Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed in him? No!
But this mob that knows nothing of the law—there is a curse on them.”

In that exchange we see what in more modern times we call Silo Thinking. I suspect that the scribes and Pharisees who ran the temple were ordinary responsible leaders like our own church and government leaders. But clearly, they were trapped in a Silo of their own thinking and conclusions. Like many folks inside a bureaucratic structure, they existed in an echo chamber of their own ideas echoed back to them by their supporters. And the effort to kill Jesus looks to me like an effort to protect the institutional structure that kept these men in power and prestige.

In such an echo chamber, no new ideas, no ideas that challenge the conventional wisdom and no upstart preachers such as Jesus who have not come up through their ranks are to be taken seriously. Earlier in John 7, the author quotes these chief priests in a telling comment:

v15 “How did this man get such learning without having been taught?”

In this story, Jesus is tried in the Court of Public Opinion. We know that in our time, this court destroys the reputations of public figures in a matter of hours. The Internet turns the entire world into a mob ready to judge and condemn, based on nothing more than rumours and innuendo, some planted by clever lawyers, but all of it unproven in a court of law. In this court, ‘if it sounds true, it must be true!’ And the more the story is repeated, the more it becomes true.

The questions swirling in the crowd in John 7 sound like those of strategically planted troublemakers. The ‘no prophet can come from Galilee’ meme drove an effective wedge of doubt into the crowd as it was supposed to do. Jesus falls victim to this group again when he faces Pontius Pilate. Apparently this time, Jesus escapes unharmed. But he does not stand down. Reading on in John 8, Jesus argues publicly that his church leaders are sons of the devil convincing more in the crowd that he is the Messiah. The next time, the chief priests will make sure there is no public debate, only a nighttime arrest, a flogging and a crucifixion.

We too are plagued by rumour mills, echo chambers and leaders who cling tighter to bureaucracy than to the truth. Our only clear path through this chaos is to stay close to Jesus, and follow his lead.

Peter Mansell Advent, 2014