“Marvel in God’s Mystery”

John 8:48-59

 Ours is not an age that is tolerant of mysteries.  We want answers.  We want solutions.  The stories we call mysteries are stories of investigation, stories of deducing from facts the story behind the mystery.  Catch the criminal, identify the disease, and explain the phenomenon.  This is good, by and large.  Human curiosity and reason have made our lives in this world better in many ways.  We have learned to travel all over the world in a variety crafts that operate within the limits of the physical laws that we have discovered over the centuries.  I wrote this sermon on a laptop computer, a machine that is the product of decades of research and invention by tens of thousands of inquisitive human minds.  It almost seems as if there is no limit to humanity’s ability to explore and understand the universe.  Today people dream of all kinds of things, and many of their dreams may yet be realized. 

 However, there is one aspect of life that resists the relentless efforts of our reason.  Life as it relates to God is beyond our human reason to grasp.  We can’t reduce God to something that makes sense to us.  Not that that has ever stopped us from trying.  Human history offers us a colorful and confusing smorgasbord of religions and images of God.  People of every generation have tried to understand God, but none of us succeeded in our efforts.  There is an old Asian story of six blind men who were asked to determine what an elephant looked like by feeling different parts of the elephant's body.  The blind man who felt a leg said the elephant was like a pillar; the one who felt the tail said the elephant was like a rope; the one who felt the trunk said the elephant was like a tree branch; the one who felt the ear said the elephant was like a hand fan; the one who felt the belly said the elephant was like a wall; and the one who felt a tusk said the elephant was like a solid pipe.  Blindness kept the six from comprehending this great creature, and another kind of blindness stands in the way of our comprehending God.  

The Pharisees and the priests, those men who argued with Jesus and opposed him, were intelligent people.  They had years of Bible study behind them.  They had served in synagogues and the Temple teaching people and worshipping God.  They certainly thought that they understood God and His expectations of them, but they did not understand Jesus.  Jesus knew the Scriptures, He was always referring to them, but He had very little appreciation for the customs and ways of living that developed over the centuries to help Jewish people in their devotion to God.   Jesus was deeply committed to holiness, He was not soft on sin, yet He befriended people whose lives were mired in sin’s filth.  Jesus was a man, just like any other man it seemed, yet He said things that only God could rightly say; this made the religious leaders uncomfortable and led them to accuse Him of heresy or satanic influence: “Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?”  

In the conversation between Jesus and them that forms today’s Gospel, Jesus speaks clearly and simply, but the religious leaders do not understand what He says.  Again and again Jesus testifies to His divinity.  He attests that God the Father is pleased with Him and seeks to have Him honored.  He promises that those who keep His word will be spared from death.  He claims that He alone truly knows God and keeps His words.  He claims to have known Abraham, who has been dead for millennia, and then to explain this He identifies Himself by name as God.  “Truly, truly I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.”   “I AM”, in Hebrew “Yahweh”, was the holy name of God revealed to Moses.  Jesus’ words, so simple and clear, confused and enraged those to whom He spoke.  To them Jesus seemed like a big head, a man living with delusions of grandeur at best, or a dangerous heretic at worst.  When Jesus pronounced Himself “Yahweh”, a name Jews of that time would not even speak for fear of defiling it, they were ready to kill Him, stoning Him for such blasphemy. 

These Pharisees and priests had no tolerance for the holy mystery before them.  Spiritual blindness kept them from believing that Jesus was God’s Son.  It led them to reject the great promise Jesus had made: “Truly, truly I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death.”  It drove them to pick up stones to murder the One who had just promised to give them eternal life.   But they were powerless to erase the mysterious truth of Jesus’ divinity.  They rejected Him, but they could not silence Him.  “They picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.” 

Today we confess our faith in the mystery of God.  To the world we profess that God is a unity of three persons, God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  We believe, teach and confess that Holy Trinity is the one and only true God, the Maker of heaven and earth, the  Redeemer of sinful humanity, and the Giver of the grace that saves us from sin and brings us into fellowship with God forever.  Our faith in the Triune God is as incomprehensible to many of our neighbors today as was Jesus’ confession of His divine nature.  When we say that there is only one true God, and that He is the Holy Trinity, some of our friends will cluck their tongues at us, and ask , “Who are you to claim that your god is only true one?   That’s not very tolerant.  How can you be so sure that you’re right and everyone else’s idea of god is wrong?”  When we speak of the mysterious unity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, others will scratch their heads and complain, “But that doesn’t make sense to me.  How can you believe in something you can’t even explain?” 

How can we be so certain that we know the true God when we call upon the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in faith?  Our confidence does not rest in ourselves.  Christian faith is not a human invention.  Our faith rests in the testimony of God that comes to us from the Scriptures.  Through the Old and the New Testament, God has revealed Himself to us.  Jesus Himself is the revelation of God in human nature; He is the Word who became flesh to dwell among us.  He confessed to His enemies that He knew and revealed the true nature of God to them: “If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing.  It is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say, ‘He is our God.’  But you have not known him.  I know him.  If I were to say that I do not know him, I would be a liar like you, but I do know him and I keep his word.” 

When we confess our faith in the Holy Trinity we are not boasting that we are right and all other people who do not believe in Him are wrong.  The faith that we have in God is not something we have worked up in ourselves, so that we can take pride in it and look down our noses at non-Christians.  God the Holy Spirit has graciously given us our faith to believe in the one Lord who is the unity of three divine persons.  We trust in the words of Jesus and their testimony to the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit.  We confess our faith in the Triune God fully admitting that we are as sinful as every other human being and acknowledging that He alone can save us from death and hell. 

When we confess that we believe in the Holy Trinity, we are saying that Scripture reveals God to be the mysterious unity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  We acknowledge that we cannot fully comprehend God, for we worship Him as the Great Creator, the Loving Redeemer and the Gracious One who has brought us into this relationship of faith, hope and love.  We are fallen creatures wonderfully raised up to live in fellowship the Father, Son and Holy Spirit by faith.  We know God truly by believing what He has shown us in His Word, not by reducing Him to something that seems reasonable to our sin-crippled minds. 

So we live with a mystery, a truth that we can trust and be blessed by not because our minds have plumbed its heights, depths, widths and breadths, but because it is the revelation of the God who though He is greater than us, wants us all to know Him even as we known by Him.   Confess your faith in the Triune God with boldness, not shame.  Confess it always with the prayer that those who hear you may receive the same gift of faith that God has given you.  Rejoice in the mystery of our great God who is the Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity.  In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.