June 7, 2015 John 5:15 – 30

Download discussion questions:  John 5_15-30 whatever the Father does

Until now, much of what John has written has been narrative accounts with some dialog (Jesus and Nathanael, Jesus at Cana, Jesus cleansing the temple, Jesus and Nicodemus, John the Baptizer and his followers, Jesus and the Samaritan woman, Jesus and the royal official, Jesus healing the sick man).

There has been some direct teaching as Jesus interacted with different persons in different circumstances, but this passage and several more to follow are extended, detailed discourses by Jesus. This passage (John 5:15-30) is His response to the accusation of the Jews, that He was “making Himself equal with God.”

Jesus begins with a startling disclaimer:  “The Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing.”  He reiterates and even clarifies the claim that offended the Jews, His divine Sonship.  At the same time He makes a clear distinction between His role and His Father’s role.  All through this passage Jesus distinguishes between the function of the Father (who initiates, plans, and sends) and the Son (who imitates and implements carries out the work He was sent to do).  He doesn’t contradict or deny the Jews’ allegation that He claims equality with God, but he begins to spell out how two Persons can be accomplishing the work of God.

In the middle of His explanation how He is doing only what is from the Father Jesus does make one emphatic distinction:  “Not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son” (v. 22).  Our group discussion spent considerable time on this particular sentence.  Perhaps the emphasis is on Jesus as the Incarnate God, the One who took on flesh and knows first-hand about temptation and struggle and the effects of sin on all those around Him.  As an expression of His love and of His justice, the Father delegated judgment to Jesus as one who could never be accused of not understanding, of not having been tempted by everything Satan and the world could offer.  God’s judgment is from One who was tempted and suffered.  And even that judgment by the Son is not in isolation from the Father but is completely in accordance with the Father and His mission for the Son (v. 30).

Jesus had a lot to say in this passage about the Father-Son relationship.  The relationship may be summed up by two phrases from v. 19-20:  The Son sees what the Father is doing, and the Father loves the Son.  The Jews seemed to have their focus on the “doing” part, the Law, making sure everyone checked off the right boxes.  (Remember, this discourse by Jesus started with the Jews having a complaint against a man carrying a mat on the Sabbath.)  Jesus emphasized both what the Father is doing and that the Father loves the Son.  The relational dimension seems to have completely escaped the Jews.  Obedience to the Law was all that mattered.  That obedience mattered more than the restoration of a thirty-eight year invalid (v. 5 from last week’s discussion).  Both in His words and in His actions, Jesus demonstrated the centrality of relationships, beginning with His relationship with His Father.  The Father loves the Son and the Son does nothing but what the Father wants.  One of the group members commented that this reminded her of a friend who remembers from childhood the first time he cleaned his room because he wanted to please his mother, not because she told him to.  The Son’s obedience to the Father’s will and to the mission He was given was because of that relationship, that intimacy, not because of the Law that the Jews obsessed over.

The illustration of the child cleaning his room continued in our conversation.  Why did the mother want her son to clean his room?  Not to check a box but because she knew that a room where the boy could find his toys and not step on them would be best for him and would make his life better.  The Jews missed that aspect of the Law, that it was given for our benefit, that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.  The Jews seemed to act as if stuffing all the toys and clutter under the bed was all that was required, like whitewashing tombs to make the outside look good.  But Jesus (and the little boy) knew that relationships were key.  The Father loved the Son (and the mother loved the son), and that relationship was the delight that took the place of duty.  The obedience to the Father’s love was the very energy-giving food to the Son (John 4:34), just like the little boy drew the energy to clean his room from his relationship with his loving mother.

The relationship between Jesus and His Father is not merely an academic aspect of the doctrine of the Trinity.  As one person commented in our group, that relationship is the model for our relationship with God and with each other, a hint of what is to come in John 17.  The eternal relationship between the Father and the Son is the core of all reality, and that profound fact should shape our understanding of life and how important relationships are.

Jesus relationship with His Father caused Him to desire that others would honor His Father (v. 23).  The honor of the Father and the honor of the Son are inextricably linked, and the Jews failure to honor the Son demonstrated their lack of understanding of the Father.  The Jews put the Law and the letter of obedience above the relational priority of God’s work in the world.

Jesus made it clear that the honor and relationship with Him was inseparable from the honor of His Father.  At this stage not much has been said about the Holy Spirit, but our perspective on the entire Bible brings to mind the Trinity as Jesus talks about the Father and the Son.  Seeing the distinct character and role of each member of the Trinity is important.  Jesus spent significant time in this passage (and in more to come later) making just this point, that the Father and the Son are distinct Persons, and the honor and glory we give them are connected.  The better we understand the Persons of the Trinity, the better we will see the glory in each of them and in their relationships with each other.  Too often we tend to ignore or blur those glorious distinctions, and “God” becomes a vague, blurry concept.  Seeing how Jesus is distinct from yet in perfect unity with the Father will enable us to see each of them with growing clarity and precision and joy.  British theologian Leslie Newbegin lamented that we settle for vagueness in our understanding of God:

The vague idea of ‘God’ which most people in our society imagine to be the central point of concern in all the religions, has been produced by the flowing together of streams from the Bible, Greek philosophy and Muslim theology (which played a decisive part in the birth of modern western theology in the 13th century). This is something very different from the Christian understanding which has always at its centre the figure not of a sovereign potentate but of a crucified man, and which is adequately set forth only in the fully Trinitarian teaching of the early centuries. When the Christians of the early centuries faced the task of saying who Jesus is in terms of the ‘lords many and gods many’ of the classical world, they could only do it by means of the Trinitarian’ model. It is significant that when the word ‘God’ is spoken in discussions such as the present, few Christians think immediately of the Trinity. The operative model is not trinitarian but unitarian. [1]

[1] J. E. Leslie Newbigin, Christian Witness in a Plural Society (London: British Council of Churches, 1977), 7.