Nothing Lacking In Jesus

He Knows Your Face

John 14:8-11

Pastoral Prayer: Gracious Father, we are not the first to question what we hear and see. The disciples had event side seats to Your Words and Way in Jesus. And like the disciples, events we experience, even words we hear, may lead us to question, to wonder about what we believe. Loose Your Spirit among us that the words delivered today become Your Word for us this day such that we see, hear, and know You are the One, the God who intends to know us and us know You that we believe we have in Jesus the very Face of God. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. And all God’s people say, Amen.

When I check to see how many of you who receive the weekly email I send out, I get the sense that most of you, the majority of you, who do not read it, feel like Paul Kingsnorth in his book Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. He writes,

I don’t hate many things in this world - hate is an emotion I can’t sustain for long - but I hate screens, and I hate the digital anticulture that has made them so ubiquitous. . . . When I see a small child placed in front of a tablet by a parent on a smartphone, I want to cry; either that or smash the things and then deliver a lecture. When I see people taking selfies on mountaintops, I want to push them off. I won’t have a smartphone in the house. I despise what comes through them and takes control of us. Takes control of me when I let it. If there was a big red button that turned off the internet, I would press it without hesitation. Then I would collect every screen in the world and bulldoze the lot down into a deep mineshaft, which I would seal with concrete, and then I would skip away smiling into the sunshine.

No offense taken. There are days I feel the same way.

I recall our first not-landline-phone. We served in Milford, TX, about an hour south of Dallas. That meant the best hospitals were an hour away. When offered an opportunity for a phone, one the size of which fit in a soft case the size of a shoebox, I thought it might be useful for those trips if I needed to reach Patty or her me. Or if a call needed to be made to a family or church members to alert them of impending needs. Maybe you had a bag phone.

That was 1992 or 1993.

Since then we have moved from Bag Phone to Flip Phone to Blackberry to mobile phones that are more powerful than your tablet and some laptops.

The first phones were relatively easy to use. When they became smaller and more powerful, security measures were added. We selected passcodes so that if left somewhere, they could not be used by someone else. Then cell phone makers added fingerprint technology. Only your fingerprint would allow access to your phone. Today, it is Face ID. From time to time I help my Mom with her phone. When it requires a Face ID, it will not accept mine, only hers

Jesus tells the troubled disciples,

The one who has seen me has seen the Father.

To keep with the analogy, the way we know and have access to the Father is in the Son.

Remember, Jesus told Thomas,

If you know me, you will also know my Father. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

We tend to read every “you” as an “I” or “me,” whereas here the word “you” is plural, so it would be “Whoever,” “Those who,” or, in Okie Brogue, “Y’all.”

Whoever, those who, ya’ll know me, will know the Father, do know him and have seen him.

Let me be more nerdy for all our benefit.

In an even more nerdy way we might say,

You all know me and continue to know me. You will at some point also know my Father. And that some point is now for you know him now and have seen him in me such that you know him completely.

Nothing is lacking in Jesus’s self-revelation as the Second Person of the Trinity.

But something had been lacking in the disciples. Despite the ways YHWH showed up in the history of Ancient Israel, the disciples had only heard, maybe read, even studied times where the Divine, the LORD God, had been so close.

Sometime after YHWH’s footsteps were heard in the evening breeze in Eden, Abraham sat siesta at the entrance to his tent when he noticed three men walking his way. Genesis 18:1 begins,

The LORD appeared to Abraham at the oaks of Mamre.

The root of the Hebrew word Mamre signals strength, vigor, fatness. Yet, their bodies betray the name of the place they stay. Sarah was well past childbearing years, and Abraham was no spring chicken. Hardly images of vigor. Rushing to greet the pilgrims, Abraham offers water and bread. Bedouins practice this hospitality to this day.

During their conversation, the man identified in the passage as the LORD told Abraham that in one year’s time they would be parents.

This event is described as a theophany - an event where the Divine is revealed to humans. Here the LORD visits Abraham as a man. Might this be what is called a pre-incarnate revelation of Jesus, the Second Person of the Trinity? Many think so.

Theophanies.

These events dot the Story of God told as the LORD God revealed Himself to Ancient Israel.

Jacob prepares to meet his brother Esau. He spends the night alone at the Ford of the Jabbock. During the night he wrestles with a man until daybreak. Unable to escape, the man dislocates Jacob’s hip. Before letting go, Jacob is given a new name, one that identifies his adversary as God Himself. His new name, Israel, means

“You have struggled with God and men and prevailed.”

Jacob in turn names the place Peniel,

“For I have seen God face to face, yet my life has been spared.”

It was believed that seeing God’s face meant certain death.

Moses is having a conversation with YHWH at the Tent of Meeting located ahead of the people. When God’s presence descended as a cloud over the Tent of Meeting. While there, Moses and God would talk. On this occasion, God was sending Moses and the people on ahead with a couple of angels. Moses protested, telling YHWH not to send him or the people anywhere if YHWH would not go with them. Once Moses is assured that YHWH will go with him and his fellow wanderers, Moses makes a plea.

Let me see your glory.

YHWH told Moses to grab the second set of tablets and meet him on the Mountain, on Sinai. Moses would be able to see YHWH’s glory but not his face. Moses was to locate himself on a rock. God would cover Moses until his glory, his face, would pass by, such that Moses saw not YHWH’s face but, as it were, the back of his head.

This event became such a one that six times it is referenced in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures.

King Nebuchadnezzar, the narcissistic leader of Babylon, desired to be worshipped above all things. He had a golden statue created to be worshipped. Three Hebrew boys in the king’s employ refused to bow at the commanded moment. In keeping with the decree, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego would be thrown into the fiery furnace. Heated to seven times its normal temperature, such that one fellow stoking the fire was killed. The three were thrown into the fire. Looking into the blaze, the king asked, how many did we throw into the fire? Three. Then how is it we see a fourth? One that looks like the son of the gods.

Theophanies. Events where the Divine is revealed to humans. There are some 60 passages in the Bible in which, in one way or another, God, the One determined not to be God without us, reveals Godself.

Something was lacking.

These were but glimpses, foreshadowings, foreshadows of the God John declares,

In beginning was the Word the Word was with God and the Word was God.

John goes on in the Prologue to say,

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son, from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Thus, for those early readers of John’s Gospel, like we today, hear Jesus say,

The one who has seen me has seen the Father.

When it comes to seeing and knowing the Father, nothing is lacking in Jesus for He is in the Father and the Father is in him.

No one, John says, has ever seen God. The one and only Son, who is himself God and is at the Father’s side - he had revealed him.

Imagine the disciples hearing Jesus and his attempts to still their troubled hearts. We might think Jesus has just sat them down to hear a philosophy lecture about the nature of Being. Those are our categories. What the disciples had conceived of Jesus, Jesus told them in his response to Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi,

Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father in heaven.

Jesus does give them the nature of Being but not as a philosophical answer to the question of existence. Instead, he gives them the intention of God the Father, to reveal himself, what he is like, the One who to them has been hidden in theophanies, in prophets’ words, in miracles, in stories of deliverance and discipline, in plenty and in want.

Jesus reveals the God who does real things in the real world. He tells them, this Father whose intention is to be known has come in flesh and blood, in our humanity to reveal, to explain, who the God who said Let there be is and is like.

Jesus makes three appeals to the disciples. He asks them,

Don’t you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?

We may hear this question in light of the crowds who found Jesus worthy of hearing,

They [those gathered in the synagogue] were astonished at his teaching because he was teaching them as one who had authority and not like the scribes.

And here John points to Jesus’s authority,

The words I speak to you I do not speak on my own.

Put another way, “We are one in this.”

Just before Jesus begins his Farewell Discourses, before being betrayed and crucified, he tells the disciples at the end of our John 12,

For I have not spoken on my own, but the Father himself who sent me has given me a command to say everything I have said. I know that his command is eternal life. So the things I speak, I speak just as the Father has told me.

Hear the words of Jesus. Hear the words of God. And we pray each week that though the preacher’s sins are many, the Holy Spirit speaks to us a Word that is God’s word for us that day, even this day.

By the Spirit of God, the Triune God’s Words, delivered by the Son, enter us through our ears and into our hearts. Jesus is giving the disciples the words.

Jesus then tells the disciples,

Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me.

Don’t you believe?

If not, believe!

They hear his words. Jesus tells them to believe that, if they had believed in him as Lord of all, they now question because he has told them he is leaving.

Jesus then points to what they have witnessed. That is, they have seen the works Jesus has done, and they testify to who He is.

The works the disciples have witnessed have call-backs in Ancient Israel’s own story. Now the one story that summarizes it all is at hand. For Jesus is Himself God, and revealing the God who will raise Jesus from the dead, having first delivered Israel from Egypt.

The Spirit will lead the disciples to make this connection. Not that Jesus is a new Moses. They do not see Moses’s face when they see Jesus. They see the Face of God. And by God’s Spirit, through the Church, the world might see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, even today.

The Apostle Paul puts it this way to the Corinthians,

For God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.