The name of Jesus

 

Sunday 25^th April – Easter 4

Acts 4:5-12. A man was healed by the “name” of Jesus and we are saved by his “name”. Names in the ancient world carried meaning and power so let us look at the name of Jesus. Jesus is the Greek rendition of Jesus’ actual name which was Joshua and Joshua means “God is salvation”. Although some Christians see this as a proof text proclaiming the uniqueness of Christ (effectively only Christians can be saved), this cannot overrule the universality of God’s healing love for the whole world, which He loves in all its pluriform diversity of religious practice and belief.

1 John 3: 16-24. Everything that flows from the name of Jesus, in terms of his life and teaching, which in shorthand we say is “love” is to be emulated by believers. In the East this is known as Deification and in the West as sanctification, both really meaning “growing into the likeness of Christ”.

John 10: 11-18. Building on the assertion that God is salvation Jesus invokes the “I am” mode of speech which in Judaism is the name of God. (See Exodus 3:14). God/Jesus is the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep of his own accord. A perfect gift offered to God to cement an eternal relationship between God and humanity.

 

 I am going to talk about names. Because in the Acts reading a man was healed by the “name” of Jesus and in 1John we are to believe in the “name” of Jesus.

I know everyone here is well informed, but even intelligent and well-informed people can miss obvious things hidden in plain sight right in front of us.

The thing is of course that “Jesus” was not his actual name. This is a Greek rendition of his actual name which was “Joshua”.  

And Christ wasn’t his surname either. Christ isn’t a name – it is a title, again Greek, which translates the word Messiah which means the anointed one.

As Christ is a title that’s how you see Jesus Christ and Christ Jesus or Jesus the Christ in our Bibles.

Why this matters is because in the Acts reading we read that we are saved by the name of Jesus.

Saving and healing are the same word in this passage, and of course even in English the root of our word salvation is to salve, like a healing balm.

So what does Joshua mean? It means literally “God is salvation”

Through Jesus we have an access point to the healing will and purposes of God. And healing lies no-where else but with God.

Jesus is a conduit for the love of God to be revealed fully to the world and in John’s first letter we are instructed that our personal mission as followers of Christ is to grow more Christ-like in our lives, thinking and actions.

We don’t do this in a vacuum of course. We have Christ as the shepherd of his flock guiding us every step of the way so we don’t get lost or separated from the others.

Our compass is his life and actions of course, so we have to try and understand and then emulate those actions.

Understanding the principles that guided Jesus and building them into our lives is a life-long task and we all fail often. But even though we fail, we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and start all over again – I feel a song coming on……

How can we be sure that Jesus is the true template and guide for our lives though?

Well, primarily because God raised him from the dead which was God sending a very clear message that everything that Jesus claimed about himself was true and he was indeed the image of the invisible God.

In his gospel, John neatly conflates God and Jesus by putting the words into Jesus’ mouth “I am the good shepherd” and here I need to speak about names again.

“I am” is also the name of God revealed to Moses in Exodus 3:14.

As Archbishop Michael Ramsey said many years ago. God is as Jesus is. You want to know what God is like? His character, purpose, message for the world – look into the heart of Jesus and there you’ll find it.

We know God is love because Jesus was love.

We know God loves mercy and forgiveness because Jesus loves mercy and forgiveness.

We know God’s character is one of humble self-giving sacrifice because that is what Jesus’ character is like.

Jesus leads us into the heart of God, and it is God’s will to heal and save us all. Understanding the name of Jesus leads us to know that God’s will is perfectly represented in and through his life. “God is salvation”.

 

The power of the resurrection

 

Sunday 18^th April – Easter 3

Acts 3: 12-19. In this speech given to the witnesses to the healing of a lame man, Peter attributes the healing to the name of Jesus whom he calls “the author of Life” and places Jesus firmly within the Jewish revelation. Jesus is the glorious servant of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It is the author of life alone that has the power and authority to give, sustain and restore fullness of life.

1 John 3: 1-7. John here appears to contradict himself with purporting to uphold the sinlessness of believers when he had already said in chapter 1 verse 8. “Those who say they have no sin deceive themselves”. You could say that what we have is the reality of the situation clashing headlong with the aspiration that we are all automatically perfected. But then of course, Paul manages to meld those two contradictory thoughts together by saying that while we all sin, our righteousness is “reckoned to us” by God – declared righteous even when we are not as Paul says in Romans 4.

Luke 24:36-48. Luke is not interested in Paul’s assertions of “spiritual bodies” (1 Corinthians 15:4) and asserts in accordance with classic Jewish thought that the resurrection is very physical. Our whole created selves are raised in a very physical new earth. That juxtaposition only serves to deepen the mystery of the resurrection. The risen Jesus of course subsequently does vanish. Trust that the author of life cannot die, and in whatever form we are raised – we are risen indeed.

 

The resurrection. Human language struggles to describe it and human thought to grasp it.

It is not simply a physical event, as if Jesus came back to life to live until he died a natural death.

Nor is it a simply a spiritual or psychological event, as a ghost or simply alive in his disciple’s memories. It is of a completely new and different order of things

The effect of which is to really know that after death our loved ones are alive in some new order of being. For what happened to Jesus is what happens to us all.

Our own human experiences of death are no less strange or indescribable than that of Jesus’ disciples.

I remember after Alexandra, my first wife died, I was woken by the sound of Alex calling my name – I heard her distinctly - from the next room and I got up and answered the call.

Now Louise will doubtless tell you, as a doctor, that such occurrences are surprisingly commonplace, but that doesn’t diminish the power of the event. It is how that event touches you.

I remember also being fixated with the sight of a Heron on the river Tees that ran by the vicarage as being somehow representative of her and being set free. That too was quite a powerful experience. People who have lost loved ones will re-count their own stories of otherwise odd, seemingly silly events that they dare not tell many people in case they get laughed at. The power lies in the meaning you attach to these things – it is as if, the person, or God himself, is trying to contact you, to comfort you, conveying the message that the person is alive but unseen.

Another unexpected gift of the death of a loved one is a much greater compassion, a knowledge that you didn’t have before. You have touched something fundamental about the universe and out of that experience can come a kind of personal resurrection – a re-birth  of your own soul. True resurrection is not simply what happens when you die, it is the fundamental nature of life itself.

Of course I did many funerals before Alex died and I’m sure I was competent but afterwards there was a different quality to those encounters. I could really speak to people about death because I could speak out of personal knowledge and there is no substitute for that..     

The power of the resurrection is an energy, like wind blowing, or water running or light shining that can transform the consciousness of people.

It is the power of transforming love, lifting up, raising up, making things new and this power the disciples felt in the here and now. And we can too.

If someone asks, did the resurrection really happen on the third day?

We answer yes.

First the Spirit of God raised Jesus and communicated that fact to the disciples.

Then, the new reality dawns and a tremendous surge of spiritual transformative energy is released into the world and the Disciples were born again with the energy of Jesus flowing through them.

The truth of the resurrection is lived by believers transformed by the power of Christ’s victory over death.

There is nothing to be gained by arguing over how the gospels don’t agree with each other or Paul may contradict Luke or vice versa.

Something wonderful happened that was, as we see almost indescribable. Our loved ones are alive. We will meet again and until that time we live in the power of the resurrection now.

 

Learning from experience - bathed in prayer

 

Sunday 11^th April – 2^nd of Easter

Acts 4: 32-35. A highly idealised view of what the church may have looked like in the first few weeks after the resurrection but it obviously didn’t catch on and this form of community life is only practised, even half closely, in Monasteries and convents nowadays. Though note that if we take Luke literally the charity only extended to fellow Christians. A more modified generosity and  charitable frame of mind is now the norm based on the understanding that we are all made in the image of God.

1John 1:1 – 2:2. We live in a world far removed from the understanding that animal sacrifices atone for anything, but if we understand sacrifice as a free will self-offering to God as a gift (The original impetus) and understand that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:19 we shuffle closer to the full import of the cross for Christians which John concludes was for the “whole world”.

John 20: 19-31. There is no need to wear Lucan glasses and see this giving of the Spirit as some kind of prelude to Pentecost. For John this is an equivalent story and is reminiscent of God breathing the breath of life into Adam in Genesis. The episode with Thomas is to illustrate the nature of resurrection faith. Thomas says he will only believe when he can see and touch Jesus’ wounds but when given the chance to do so, he acknowledges Jesus as his “Lord and God” before actually doing so. Jesus then blesses all people who will do the same thing, believe without seeing.

 

One of the failings of the human mind is to be captured by an “all or nothing “ overly literal attitude to rules and regulations more suited to small extremist cults than a religion that aims to change hearts, minds and perceptions on the world-wide stage.

In the book of acts we have Luke’s account of a situation in the early church that could only have lasted a few weeks or months before proving completely unworkable.

I mean how would it feel if I said that in order to become a Christian, or member of this church you had to sell your house and give that and all your money and possessions to the PCC to do as they wished with it?

And if you refused and held back even a part of the money the penalty was death? That was what happened to Ananias and his wife Sapphira in the next paragraph.

What we are seeing and reading here is the start of a process of working out  how high ideals translate when the rubber hits the road of real life.

The real take-home message from this passage is that honesty, both personal and financial is of paramount importance. The real sin of Ananias and Sapphira  was in attempting to lie and defraud the church.

Personal integrity – My word is my bond – is essential for any family including the church family to thrive.

Another notion you can take from this is that all my possessions are on loan to me – that fact that no material possessions are intrinsically or eternally mine should guide our thinking sitting alongside a natural generosity to those less fortunate than ourselves is guided by the knowledge that we are all children of God, but that differences in natural attributes, upbringing and education, and good old-fashioned good fortune, leads to natural and different outcomes for people.

You cannot legislate for equality of outcome, but you can try and legislate for equality of opportunity.

We are also minded to always be kind and generous to the poor whilst at the same time noting that Jesus said “The poor you will always have with you” in Matthew and Mark because poverty is relative. This to me is the guiding principle of the welfare system – to make sure there is always a safety net against destitution – completely in line with Christian principles.

On the wider spiritual canvas you will note that in John’s gospel Jesus breathes the spirit into them and that earlier in the same gospel (16:13) says that “the Spirit will guide you into all truth”.

That says to me that the truth is not presented fully formed but we are guided through the realities of life towards the truth of any situation.

Life experience moulds us but as Christians our life experience should be bathed in prayer that we learn from the right lessons from life.

In this respect all experience is beneficial to our spiritual growth. Good experience and bad experiences together. In fact we learn more from bad experiences than the good ones.

This is how we should relate to St. Paul saying that he rejoices in his sufferings – that is a profoundly Christian attitude to life – that all human experience can lead us further into the mystery of Christ.

And we really can say along with St. Paul in Romans “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose.