John 10:42 And in that place many believed in Jesus.
It is a wonderful thing when a plan comes together and accomplishes the purposes for which it was conceived. So many plans just seem to fall apart. “Two weeks to slow” certainly didn’t stop the fear surrounding the flu. Even my personal plans have had to shift recently.
I am building an addition to our home. I received the permit and then began the process of project planning, setting out when materials need to arrive, basically, what needs to be done when and what needs to arrive when. Well, as you can imagine, with supply shortages, this has brought about some surprises.
The first shock was that the roof trusses would take about eight months to produce! That means August, in Florida, in the heat, putting up trusses and roof shingles! Get the picture! Not what I had planned in my head. And everything needs to be planned out. Plumbing fixtures, tile, drywall, studs, plywood sheathing, concrete siding, nails, electrical wire…. I am getting tired just thinking about it.
Plans can fall through. Just because it is planned doesn’t mean it will happen. Even the best laid plans fail.
The Gospel of John was written with one main purpose, to get people to believe in Jesus. That is the stated purpose written near the end of the book. I believe in Jesus because of the book of John. Reading it changed my life.
One of the repeated features of the book are the contrasts between those who refuse to believe and those that do believe. The likely candidates, the religious leaders for instance, don’t believe. (Although there are those that do believe, we are told in the narrative itself.) But the grand contrast between those in power not believing and those at the bottom believing is the most powerful drumbeat of the whole Gospel.
Our text comes at the end of a series of discussions between Jesus and these religious leaders. They continue to question Jesus about His identity. They want to know if He is the Messiah. He tells them He is, and they return with another set of the same old questions, the answer to which the don’t listen. They have made up their minds long before the question is asked or the answer given.
Now this discussion springs out of a healing that Jesus performed. A man was born blind and Jesus healed he man. But Jesus broke one of the set in stone rules of the Jewish community. Jesus did what might be classified as “work” on the wrong day. He did it on the Sabbath, the seventh day of the Jewish calendar.
For us, we might say, “What’s the big deal?” Today everything is done on every day. Just ask the sports teams that play games on Sunday Morning at 11:00! Chick fil-A is one of the few places that is closed on Sunday. When I was a kid, almost everything was closed on Sunday.
But for the Jews, work on Sunday encompassed so many things, that if you wanted to, you could find a violation in just about everything you did. Only the most observant felt like they were on top of this one. And they wanted you to know that fact!
But Jesus would have none of it. Healing this man was an act of compassion, and compassion had no schedule. Compassion could be done at any time, on any day, anywhere.
And when that happened, people believed in Jesus. Compassion can be hard to argue with, even for the professional debaters like the religious leaders of Jesus’ day. Despite their efforts to dissuade people from believing in Jesus, people came and stayed.
Maybe we need to do a bit more compassion!
The Arnold Journey 