Truth Speaks In the Language of Love

Advent Around the Table: Week 4, Love

Thank you for joining

Janell Downing

,

Mel Bjorgen

,

John Blase

, and me for Advent Around the Table. We pray you have been blessed as you await the coming Messiah. Regular Wednesday articles will resume here at Beautiful Discipleship on Jan. 8th.

One Saturday morning during his ministry Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem, to a pool called Bethesda which teemed with hundreds of the city’s most desperate and downtrodden. He heals one lame man who had been waiting there beside the pool for 38 years, alone and invisible in a crowd of people.

But there was one hiccup to this story’s happy ending.

It was the Sabbath, and the religious leaders were not pleased that Jesus was conducting his ministry outside of their routines and rituals. When they confront him about his Sabbath activities, Jesus responds, “God never stops working, so why should I?” making himself equal with almighty God.¹

Now the Jewish leaders want to kill him.

But Jesus doesn’t try to defray the impending conflict, to divert the inevitable violence. Instead, he comes out rhetorically swinging. He speaks for 29 verses, leaving us and the religious leaders no room to doubt that he is claiming to be God.

“The works that I do,” he says, “bear witness to who I am” (John 5:36). Both the miraculous way that Jesus can heal and the very fact that he heals on the Sabbath are these “works” that bear witness.

I love this story because it puts flesh on the skeletal thesis John gives us in chapter 1, that Jesus is “the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

Jesus is the Word, the Truth spoken in Love.

Jesus heals the lame man in an act of great love, but also has a word of truth for him:

Afterward Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.” (John 5:14)

The religious leaders sneer at the way Jesus restores wholeness because he does it outside their approved schedule. They believe they speak the truth, but they have forgotten love. Jesus’s judgment of them is swift and sure.

You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life…

Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?

John 5:39-40, 45-47

I worry that we too—whether due to our individual personalities, our childhood experiences, our church traditions, or a combination of all this and more—are prone to hitch our wagons to a Jesus full of love or full of truth. I fear those of us who are familiar with Scripture have glossed over his words, their cutting between soul and spirit, joint and marrow still leaving us unmoved.

If Jesus returned today, what would he say to us?

Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Paul, on whom you have set your hope. You search the epistles because you think that in them you have eternal life, that they will reveal to you a true, infallible doctrine. But if you believed Paul, you would believe me; for he wrote of me.

We speak the Truth divorced from Love and it stings rather than soothes, it is a bomb rather than a balm, leaving only destruction beneath its mushroom cloud.

Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Matthew, Mark, and Luke, on whom you have set your hope. You search the gospels because you think that in them you have eternal life, that in them you will uncover the secret to loving everyone and being loved by everyone. But if you believed Matthew, Mark, and Luke, you would believe me; for they wrote of me.

We speak Love divorced from Truth and it coddles rather than comforts, it is sugar without substance, cotton candy that dissolves on the tongue and leaves the belly aching with hunger.

Jesus, both Truth and Love in perfect harmony, combines in otherworldly beauty a quality that we cannot hope to replicate. And yet, for us who are “in Christ”, the power of the Holy Spirit works miraculously to transform us into this likeness of Jesus. In Him, we also become capable of speaking the Truth in Love as we “grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Eph. 4:15).

In Christ we can affirm that

The day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch (Mal 4:1).

While also singing:

Hail the heav’n born Prince of Peace!
Hail the Sun of Righteousness!
Light and life to all He brings,
Ris’n with healing in His wings.
Mild He lays His glory by,
Born that man no more may die;
Born to raise the sons of earth,
Born to give them second birth.

Hark! the herald angels sing,
“Glory to the newborn King!”

Praise God that Truth has spoken to us in the language of Love, and that He will never cease speaking.

1. John 5:17, my paraphrase.