We Will Never Be Snatched from His Hands

It was the Feast of Dedication, and Jesus was walking in the temple in the portico of Solomon, when some people came to Him and asked Him to give them the plain truth. He had walked through the countryside and the city, healing, teaching, and making some claims that suggested He might be the hoped-for Messiah. He had even revealed His identity privately, to people like the Samaritan woman He encountered at the well, but He had never come right out in public and announced it. His questioners in tonight’s Gospel reading were curious. Enough miracles and parables – they wanted the bottom line.

What John called the Feast of Dedication is more familiar to us as Chanukah, the Festival of Lights, commemorating the recapture and rededication of the Temple in the Maccabaean Revolt against the Seleucids. At the time of Jesus’ ministry, Jerusalem was under new occupiers – the Romans. Many Jews of the time expected the “Messiah” to be a new king, of the Davidic line, who would restore Israel to her former glory – not the literal Son of God, fully divine. It is likely, then, that this particular feast day inspired Jesus’ questioners to ask Him if He was the Messiah, as if to say, “Look, we’re surrounded by enemies. This is our hour of need. Let’s get on with it.”

But Jesus refused to shore up their narrow expectations of who the Christ would be and what He would do – just as the post-resurrection Christ today always finds ways of crushing our small, accessible images of Him right when we’re sure we’ve finally figured it out. God is not a fix-it man or a magic spell or a philosophical construct; as Paul said, “Now we see as in a mirror, dimly, but then” – in the life to come – “we will see face to face.”

And so Jesus responded to his questioners with the truth, but not the truth they wanted to hear: “The Father and I are one.” When I read this passage, trying to figure out what to say about it tonight, I was immediately struck by the boldness of this claim, that Jesus and God the Father are identical – not only in purpose and power, but in being and spirit. How absolutely blown away, disgusted, offended, and outraged His Jewish listeners must have been! In fact, these particular Jews, John tells us, tried to stone Jesus for blasphemy the moment these words left His lips. That a man could be identical with God, of whom the Jews said twice a day, “The Lord our God, the Lord is one”! That God, the God who in the Hebrew Scriptures enveloped a mountain and killed those who touched it, Who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, Whom the prophets saw and then despaired of living, would come to earth and walk and eat and touch the sick and the sinful! It must have seemed impossible.

Often, I think, we lose sight of the enormity of this claim. Jesus was fully man and fully God, but it’s often so much easier to understand what it meant for Him to be a man than for Him to be God. When I saw the movie The Passion, I was filled with pity and sadness at what this sinless man was suffering because of my sins. But, with only the faintest hint of a resurrection at the end, the film left me feeling empty – and still guilty. Jesus was neither an ordinary man nor just a prophet nor just a man that God somehow empowered to live a perfect life. He was God Himself – as Paul said, “the exact imprint of God’s very being” – and He confirmed this when He defeated death and ascended to Heaven to take up His throne and, as He said while on earth, to prepare a place for us. This Gospel reading is included in the Easter lectionary, when we focus on the post-resurrection Christ, perhaps because the claim that Jesus is fully God, that He is one with the Father, is incomprehensible and purposeless without the resurrection.

What would it mean to really believe in a Christ who really was fully divine? One thing it means is that He has the power and the desire to carry through with His promises. In tonight’s Gospel, Jesus makes an amazing promise: to give eternal life to His followers – His sheep – and never to let them be snatched from His hands. This is not just a gift bestowed cheaply and carelessly on the whole world like trinkets given to bored children in the vain hope that they will obey. The gift is freely given, yes, but given at great cost to Jesus the man and, in some sense I don’t think we can fully understand, to Jesus the divine as well. His questioners, Jesus says, are not of His sheep and so, presumably, don’t get the gifts. But it seems to me that this has nothing to do with a quid pro quo or a “catch”; Jesus is not saying, “You didn’t say the magic words or do the right things, so no eternal life for you.”

In fact, one might expect Him to have said, “You are not of My sheep because you do not believe,” but instead He says, “You do not believe because you are not of My sheep.” Even more surprising, He says, “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” The logical way of putting it, one would think, is, “My sheep hear My voice, and they know Me, and they follow me.” Central to the demands of following (and they are plenty) is the reward – being fully known by our Creator. Who else would know us so well? Who else would care for us so well? To be one of Jesus’ sheep means to hear His voice, to follow, and above all, to want to be known by Him and to know Him. Jesus’ questioners in this passage do not want to know Him as He really is. They want an earthly king, not an eternal savior.

Their demand that Jesus identify Himself stands in contrast to the response of another group of Jews – Jesus’ core group of disciples, who drop everything and follow Him when He calls. They aren’t dumb; by the time they are called, Jesus has performed several miracles they might have witnessed, and preached several sermons they probably heard. But when He calls, they don’t ask any more questions. They don’t say, “Now, we think we want to come with You, but let me just get this straight - are You really the Christ?” But neither do they have some superhuman faith that allows them to put blinders on their skepticism and follow blindly. When Jesus tells a crowd that they must eat His flesh and drink His blood, and that He will ascend to Heaven, Peter doesn’t have a clue what He means and probably concurs with the others that it sounds pretty blasphemous and bizarre. But when Jesus asks him if he wants to leave, he replies, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

Peter is desperate for salvation; he doesn’t have time to equivocate, to comparison-shop, to weigh his options, to wait for just the right words and just the right signs and deal with all his earthly business before turning his attention to things eternal. Jesus claims to have what he desires so much and seems to back up His claims with actions as no one else does, so he’s willing to put up with a little confusion and seeming inconsistency, having a feeling that later, it will all become clearer.

And it does. When Jesus tells His questioners that they are not of His sheep, He has preached and performed miracles, but He has not yet died and been resurrected. He has issued the challenge, made claims and promises, but not yet fulfilled them. We, unlike these suspicious and curious questioners of long ago, have the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection before us. We don’t have the next chapter – His coming again in glory – and in this life we won’t even understand all of the information we have, but the claims and challenges are fully laid out. The promises have been made. And the invitation has been extended.

Let me go back to these promises. Eternal life. Eternal protection. Knowing and being known. What do these mean? Maybe we get a glimpse in tonight’s reading from Revelation. The Apostle John sees a vision of Heaven. Like the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures, he falls down before the sight and has to be told to get up so he can report what he sees. A heavenly figure asks him who are all the people he sees worshipping at the throne of God, and John answers, “My lord, you know” – the same response as Ezekiel gives when God asks him if the dry bones in the valley can live. The worshippers, John is told, serve God “day and night within His temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and He will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

There are so many times in my life when God feels abstract and far away. Sometimes He seems to me like a great, unfeeling deity, concerned with great, sublime things, not with me. Sometimes I wish I could acknowledge Him, make some sacrifice to Him, bow before Him, and then go on my way. Many times I ask God to forgive my sins but think that if I just try a little bit harder this time, I can keep from messing up again and finally fix what’s wrong with me. Sometimes I think I have Him all figured out and can stow my idea of Him in a box on a shelf to take down when I need it. Other times I think God is just too big for me to understand, so I might as well not try. God is great and big beyond our understanding, and yet He still became a human being and came to earth in the form of Jesus to compel us to pay attention to Him, to try to know Him, to want to be known by Him. He came down here, getting right up in our faces, so we couldn’t abstract Him away, so we would say, like Peter, where else can we go?

And when we ask this question and desire desperately to be in God’s presence despite our uncleanness and, ultimately, to be clean, God through the resurrected Christ promises that He we will never drop us; that we will never, in this life or the next, be snatched out of His hands; and that He will, finally, wipe away all our tears.

Amen.