Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father, and
from our Lord Jesus Christ.
Text: (John
8:46-59)
Jesus
said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.” So they
picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the
temple.
Prayer: May
the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your
sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
In our sermon today, I will not set out so much as to
explain our whole Gospel reading, but I want to focus on the last couple of
verses particularly.
Jesus says at the end of his discussion with the Jewish
people: “Before Abraham was, I am.”
And then we read they picked up stones and tried to throw them at him.
Now why did they react like this?
The answer to this question takes us all the way back to
Exodus. In Exodus chapter 3, we read about where Moses sees the burning bush,
where the bush was burning and yet it
was not consumed. We read in Exodus that the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the
midst of the bush.
Sometimes today, I have heard people say, “Why doesn’t God
appear in burning bushes today?” They say this because they don’t believe in
God, and the think that if they saw something like what Moses saw, they would
believe. But here’s the thing: God didn’t appear to other people in burning
bushes. And according to the bible, God didn’t appear to Moses ever again in a
burning bush, and he never appeared to anyone in a burning bush ever again. It
was a completely once-off occasion. In fact, at the beginning of the book of
Hebrews it says: Long ago, at many times
and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last
days he has spoken to us by his Son. So as Christians, we’re not looking
for new revelations, and we’re not looking for new things for God to reveal to
us, because Jesus has come, and he is the perfect teacher of all God’s
knowledge and wisdom. He is our righteousness and he teaches us righteousness.
He is our salvation and he teaches us salvation. And so in the church today, we
simply read the living words of Jesus, and we preach on them. And when we do
this, and week after week teach people a little bit more of everything that Jesus has commanded us,
then we know that Jesus himself is present through his own words being spoken,
as he says: Go and make disciples of all
nations, baptising them…and teaching
them everything I have commanded you, and behold, I am with you always until
the end of the age.
So you can see, this is the church’s task in the world
today: to make disciples through baptising and teaching. But not just teaching
anything: teaching the words of Jesus. And also, we don’t want to be selective
and pick and choose which words of Jesus to teach, but we want to teach all the
words of Jesus, and leave nothing out. As St Paul says: I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God.
Now, back to Exodus. Moses is given a unique experience
that no-one else has ever experienced: God speaks to him from the midst of a
burning bush. And on this particular occasion, God calls Moses to lead the
Israelite people out of slavery in Egypt into the promised land of Canaan, and
to worship him at Mt Sinai.
When God said this, Moses said: If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, “The God of your
fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, “What is his name?” what shall I
say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the
people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” God also said to Moses, “Say this
to the people of Israel, “The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham,
the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.” This is my name
forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.
To understand this passage properly, we need to learn a
little bit of Hebrew. In English we have consonants and vowels. The vowels are
the long sounds we make: A, E, I, O, U. The consonants are the sounds you make
without using your vocal chords: like B, C, D, F, etc.
In Hebrew, all the letters of the alphabet are consonants.
There are no letters in Hebrew that make vowel sounds. Instead, when they write
vowels in Hebrew, they have some little dots and dashes that they put
underneath the letters to tell you which vowel to use. Sometimes in Hebrew,
they leave the vowels out—you’re just supposed to know what vowels to put in.
So reading Hebrew is a bit like when you open up the phone book, like the White
Pages or the Yellow Pages, and the names of streets and towns and suburbs are
shortened, and you just have to know what the missing letters are. So if it
says that someone lives at: Drnm, you just have to guess that it means Darnum.
That’s a little bit like how Hebrew works.
So in Exodus here, God says to Moses: I AM WHO I AM. In Hebrew, this reads: ‘ehyeh asher ‘eyheh. Then God says: Say this to the people of Israel,
‘I AM (‘ehyeh) has sent me to you.’ So the word in Hebrew for I am is ‘ehyeh.
In the English translation of the bible they also write these two expressions:
I AM WHO I AM, and I AM (as in “I AM”
has sent me to you) with capital letters, to show you that this is a
special thing that God is speaking here.
Then we read in English: Say to the people of Israel, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers… has
sent me to you.’
In the English bible, we have the word LORD written in
capital letters. And if you look in your bible at home all throughout the Old
Testament, you will often find the word LORD written in capital letters. Now
this is always used to translate the name that God speaks here, which in Hebrew
is spelled, “YHWH”.
You can see here, that there are no vowels here, just four
letters: YHWH. (This name is closely related to the word “I AM” (‘ehyeh).)
Now, what happened in Jewish history is that at one time
before Jesus was born, at least about three hundred years before Jesus, the
Jewish people stopped pronouncing this name YHWH. The reason for doing this was
that they didn’t want to break the second commandment which says: You shall not
misuse the name of the Lord your God. Or: You shall not take the name of the
Lord your God in vain.
Instead, they used to say the Hebrew word: Adonai, which
means Lord. And so right up until this day, we translate the word with the
English: LORD, written with capital letters.
Now, some people think these Jewish people were being
superstitious. What’s the point of God revealing his name, if they would never
say it? But also, we notice that in Exodus, Moses doesn’t start addressing him
with this name straight away, but uses the word, Lord (Adonai). God didn’t
accuse Moses of showing him disrespect. Just because YHWH is a distinct name
for God, doesn’t mean that it is the only way to address him. For example, my
name is Stephen van der Hoek. But sometimes, people simply call me Stephen,
Pastor, Mr van der Hoek or sir, or daddy according to the context. Some people
from other countries may even call me Stefan (as in German) or Stefano (in
Italian) or even Tapani (in Finnish), depending on where they are from.
This example does not correspond 100%. Still today,
because the Jewish people stopped pronouncing this name, there is a dispute
over exactly how it should be pronounced. In the mediaeval times, people
thought that it should be pronounced, “Yehowah” or “Jehovah.” It’s unanimously
agreed today that this is not correct. We still use this word Jehovah in a
couple of old hymns, and also the Jehovah’s Witnesses use it in the name of
their church. The most popular form of pronouncing YHWH today is Yahweh.
Even now, we sing in the church, “Hallelujah”, which means
Praise the Lord, or praise YAH, which is a short form of YHWH.
There are some people around today, like the Jehovah’s
Witnesses, the Sacred Name Movement, and some other groups, insist that this
whole business is a Jewish superstition or a Roman Catholic conspiracy, and
that we should always use the divine name. (When there’s no other answer, blame
it on all those secret things locked up in the Vatican vaults!) There have also
been some bible translations that have replaced the traditional “LORD” with
“Yahweh”, and such like.
So what did Jesus think about all of this?
Well, now we have to go back to the biblical languages
again. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, and the New Testament was written
in Greek. Greek wasn’t actually the language that Jesus spoke, but was the most
widely spoken language of the time. Jesus himself spoke Aramaic.
Beware of people who want to tell you that the real
version of the New Testament was written in Aramaic. There were some Aramaic
translations of the New Testament done very early on, and there are still some
people today in Syria who speak this. The language called Syriac is a dialect
of Aramaic which is still used in Syrian churches. Every now and then, there is
some Aramaic written out in the New Testament, especially in the Gospel of
Mark. Jesus is called “Rabbi” or “Rabboni”: meaning, my teacher. Jesus says to
a man “Ephphatha” which means “be opened.” Jesus says to a little girl,
“Talitha cumi” which means “Little girl, arise.” And on the cross, we read that
Jesus prayed, “Eli, eli, lama sabachthani?” which means “My God, my God, why
have you forsaken me?”
Before the time of Jesus, when they translated the Hebrew
bible into Greek, instead of transliterating YHWH into Greek, they always wrote
“Kyrios”, which means Lord, just as the Hebrew people were doing. The most
common version of the Greek Old Testament is called to Septuagint and was
translated over 100 years before Jesus. At the time, many Jews had spread into
Greek speaking countries such as Greece, or Egypt, and so the Old Testament was
translated into Greek.
We never read in the New Testament about Jesus going out
of his way to teach people how to say YHWH again. He seems to have simply
followed on the practice that was current in his day, and to say the word
“Lord.” We read for example in Luke 4 where Jesus went to the synagogue and
picked up the scroll and said “The Spirit of the LORD is upon me.” And then we
read that the people were impressed by what he said. They weren’t upset. But if
someone had pronounced the divine name in those days—as is still the case among
Jews today—it would have been considered a great offence.
Jesus is much more accustomed to call God “Father”. This
does cause offence!
But also, when we see the word “Lord” in the New
Testament, we have to bear in mind what’s behind this word. So when it says,
“Jesus Christ is Lord”, it means Jesus Christ is YHWH. Jesus Christ is same God
who spoke to Moses in the burning bush. Just listen to how significant these
passages are. St Paul says in Philippians 2: Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that
is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in
heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus
Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Also, St Paul says in 1 Corinthians: No one can say, “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit.
Also, Thomas says to Jesus after the resurrection, My Lord and my God!
Now, in our Gospel reading today, Jesus says something,
and then the Jewish people want to kill him. What does he say?
Jesus says: Before
Abraham was, I am. Do you understand why they wanted to pick up stones and
throw at him? Jesus was saying that he existed before Abraham. He even says,
Abraham rejoiced to see his day. And instead of saying, “I was before Abraham”
or “I existed before Abraham”, he says, “Before Abraham was, I am.” And when he
uses this phrase, “I am”, Jesus is saying that he is the same God who spoke to
Moses in the burning bush. I AM WHO I AM. Say to the people, I AM has sent me
to you.
Jesus is not just a human being, but he is also the bread of life who came down from heaven.
He came down from heaven and took flesh from the Virgin Mary. He is born of the
virgin, and also conceived by the Holy Spirit. Jesus says to Nicodemus in John
3: No one has ascended into heaven
except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.
Also, later in John’s gospel, we read about when Jesus was
arrested. Jesus says to the soldiers: Whom
do you seek? And they said, “Jesus of Nazareth.” And he said to them, “I am
he.” (In Greek, it simply says, I am.) Now just so that you don’t miss how
significant this is, John tells us, When Jesus said to them, “I am”, they drew back and fell to the ground.
This name is so powerful that it causes the soldiers to
fall to their knees.
When Jesus was on trial, the high priest asked him, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the
Blessed?” And Jesus said, “I AM, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the
right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.”
You can see how important it is for us to know the whole
bible, so that we understand what Jesus is talking about when he says these
things.
So as we prepare for Palm Sunday next week, Good Friday,
and Easter again, let’s remember just who this Lord Jesus is. Let’s take it to
heart just what it means to call Jesus Lord.
We read: “Truly,
truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.” So they picked up stones to
throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.
Let the world take offence at Jesus, and let them take
offence at us Christians, his disciples calling him Lord, calling him I AM,
calling him—Jesus—YHWH, the same God who spoke to Moses, and let Jesus hide
himself from them, and let him come and hide himself with us. Let Jesus come
and stay with us, and abide with us. Let him come and speak to us through his
word, feed us with his sacrament, and reign among us as our Lord, who was, who
is, and who is to come. Amen.
Lord Jesus Christ, you are the Alpha and the Omega, the
beginning and the end. Come and rule over us as our Lord, come and rule your
church through your word. Send your Holy Spirit into our hearts so that we may
cry out “Abba Father” and pray together with you. Amen.
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