I John 3:1-7
“Diamond”
April 18, 2021 – Third Sunday of Easter
I’ve always liked that Superman can turn a lump of coal into a diamond just by squeezing it. It’s an iconic trademarks of the man in the blue tights. Pressure from his super strong hand forces coal molecules to align and crystalize into the pure clarity of a diamond. That’s more or less how diamonds were formed a hundred miles or more beneath the earth’s surface. But it took a hundred million years or more. Industry can use pressure and heat to make artificial diamonds much faster than that, but they don’t start with coal, which is full of impurities.
We too are full of impurities. That fact is a good deal of the burden of the first letter of John. Like our text from chapter 1 and 2 last week, this week’s reading from the beginning of chapter 3 moves from focusing on the shining product God is making out of us to the impurities which hinder that process.
John starts in verse 1 with the great potential in us. Superman’s stunt is based on the fact that a substantial portion of coal is carbon, the very same element which makes up diamonds. So John says, “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.” In Christ, we already are the basic thing God wants us to be, His children.
John has been calling Jesus the Son of God, the Son of the Father all along here. And he’s been calling his readers “children.” Here he puts that together and says that we too, with Jesus, are children of God. In Jesus and through Him, that’s what we are. We already are the stuff, the element we’re supposed to be. But we’re not quite diamonds yet.
Christians are hard to figure out, says John. “The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.” If people don’t know God who loves like a Father, they won’t really get how anyone could be a child of that Father. They imagine we are arrogant to think we’re blessed with God’s love and salvation while everyone else is lost. Instead of a loving Father they see a God who is picky, judgmental and cruel, a God who selects a few chosen ones. That’s compounded now by the perception that Christians, at least white Christians, think the children whom God really loves are white children.
In the last verse of our Gospel reading today from Luke 24:48, Jesus told His disciples then and tells us now, “You are witnesses of these things.” The main message of course is that Christ has died and Christ has risen, and that God is offering repentance and forgiveness to everyone, as verse 47 says there. Now, though it might seem a smaller part of the message, we are not really witnessing, not really telling the truth, unless we remind ourselves and share with others the fact that Jesus was not white. His love, repentance, and forgiveness is not just for white people.
Our message about God, which the world needs in order to really know Him, is that He loves anyone who comes to Him like a child. Color or place in society has nothing to do with it. Before God, we are all like someone who hasn’t grown up yet, like someone not yet what we’re meant to be.
That’s why verse 2 says, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.” We are children. We are an unfinished product. Beth and I get to see our new grandson twice a week on Skype. We’ve watched him grow and discover his hands, and cut his first teeth, and learn to stick out his tongue and laugh because everyone else is laughing at him. We know what he is, a beloved child, but we also talk about what he will be.
Will our grandson be an extrovert like his father or an introvert like his mother? Will he love books and ideas like his parents, or will he break their hearts, and ours, while delighting his aunt and his uncle by taking an interest in sports? It all remains to be seen. What he is we know: the cutest little baby that has ever been, at least to us. But what he will be, only God knows.
It’s the same for every child of God. We know we are His children. We know He loves us, loves us enough that His own Son died for us. But we don’t know all that we are going to be. “What we do know,” says John, “is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” That “he” is Jesus. We are going to be like him. A hundred years later a Christian named Irenaeus said, “He became what we are so that we may become what he is.”
What then is Jesus that we as children of God are not yet? It’s right there in the next verse, “And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.” We’re not diamond yet. There are so many flaws, so many impurities in us. As country singer John Anderson drawls in an old Billy Joe Shaver song, “I’m just an old chunk of coal, but I’m gonna be a diamond someday.” But the scientific truth is that Superman would have a really hard time making a diamond out of a lump of coal because it’s not pure carbon. There’s too much else mixed in. Any diamond squeezed out of coal would be far from crystal clear and beautiful.
That’s why we’re not diamonds yet. Yes, the raw material is there. Anyone who believes in Jesus is a child of God. But the child isn’t grown yet. The carbon isn’t pure enough to crystalize yet. That’s why in the next part of the text, in verse 4, John returns to the same issue he dealt with in our text last week, our sin.
Verse 5 says succinctly what I said about expiation last week. Jesus did not just come to wave His hand and forgive our sins, “You know that he was revealed to take away sins…” That’s why that message Jesus gave the disciples at the end of Luke was not just to preach forgiveness, but to preach “repentance and forgiveness.” We don’t just get forgiven by Jesus. He expects us to repent and turn from those sins. Since we’re going to be diamonds someday, our Lord wants to begin getting rid of those impurities in us right now.
That means there is one of those annoying but necessary blends of “now and not yet” here. It also blends what God does and is going to do with what He asks us to do. Ultimately, Jesus is going to finish us off, squeeze out every impurity and make us pure, make us diamonds. He’s pure and He wants us to be that way too. Verse 5 ends, “and in him there is no sin,” while verse 6 begins, “No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him.” That’s why back in verse 2 John said “when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” To see Jesus, to see Him clearly, perfectly, purely is to become like Him, to just stop sinning. But why?
I confess I cannot fully explain why just seeing the Lord is enough to drive all the sin and impurity out of us and make us like He is. There are varying thoughts about this. But here’s one. To see and love the Lord in all His glory is to have everything you’ve always wanted, even if you don’t know it’s what you wanted. St. Augustine prayed to God, “You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
- K. Chesteron is supposed to have said something like, “the young man who rings the bell at the brothel is… looking for God.”[1] We might say that every time you go shopping, you’re shopping for God. Every time you sit and daydream about the car or the house or the job or the friend you wish you had, you’re dreaming about Jesus. Every time you head for the coast or the mountains or some other beautiful place, you’re trying to come into His presence. So when you finally are there, when you really see Jesus, it will change you, because you won’t want anything else.
On my first walk through Fred Meyer this past week, after more than a year of picking up groceries in the parking lot, I passed by some boxes of chocolate frosted donuts. I paused because they looked pretty good. But I didn’t buy any. I knew I didn’t really want them, but not because I don’t like donuts. I didn’t want those donuts because I’ve had donuts from Dizzy Dean’s Donuts just a little further down the street. I wasn’t tempted by donuts in a box manufactured a couple weeks ago because I’ve tasted Dizzy’s fresh donuts made that same day.
John wants me to realize that whatever it is I think I want, even Dizzy’s donuts, what I actually want is Jesus. He is all I’ve desired and hoped and dreamed my whole life. If I could just see that clearly enough, I wouldn’t be so tempted by donuts or anything else. John is saying that when we see Him, really see Him, His light in our eyes will be so bright that it will pass clear through our whole being, making us as transparent and pure as diamonds.
Yet verse 3 teaches us that becoming diamonds begins now. “And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.” If we believe our greatest desire and hope is to see Jesus, then it’s time to get ready for the day we see Him, to start removing the impurities that will only show up as flaws in the diamond we’re meant to be. As Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
It’s easy to get discouraged at this point. Verse 4 tells us that sin is simply the breaking of God’s law, whether that’s the Ten Commandments or the moral law written on our hearts through conscience. As James 4:17 says, “If you know the good you ought to do and don’t do it, you sin.” All of us, pretty much constantly, do that, fail to do the good we know we ought to do. But John and Jesus knew that too. That’s why we read last week that anyone who claims not to have sinned is a liar.
John never meant to discourage us. This is a text to encourage us, to give us hope for something better, not dishearten us enough to quit. Verse 6 sets a standard. It’s prescription, not description. When I taught Confirmation, a middle-school student would occasionally say something “inappropriate.” It might be a put-down of another student or a profanity. I’d sometimes say, “We don’t talk like that here.” As a description, it’s not true. One of us did just talk like that here. It happens. But as a prescription it’s absolutely true. As Christians, we learn not to swear or hurt each other with words. I say, “We don’t talk like that,” as the standard, not as a description of a life we can’t possibly live up to.
In that sense, then, even though we all sin, sinning is not what Christians do. Christians, says John, are children of God. He wants us to remember what children of God do. So we look at God’s only begotten Child Jesus, and want to be children like Him.
We are children of God both by the grace and love of God and by our own willingness to truly live as such children. Billy Joe Shaver wrote,
I’m gonna kneel and pray every day,
Lest I become vain along the way.
I’m just an old chunk of coal, now Lord,
But I’m gonna be a diamond someday.
Shaver recognized that the ultimate source of his purity, of diamond-likeness, would come from God, but he also sang,
I’m gonna learn the best way to walk.
I’m gonna search and find a better way to talk.
I’m gonna spit and polish my old rough-edged self,
’Til I get rid of every single flaw.
Now maybe that last line isn’t quite true. You and I cannot polish every last flaw from our souls, not until we finally see Jesus, as I’ve said. But there is plenty of room and many biblical reasons for finding better ways to walk and talk and work along with God to knock off some of those rough edges that hurt both ourselves and those with whom we live in this world. Shaver wrote his song at a time when new faith was helping him quit drugs and straighten out his life. It’s a song of hope.
As John said, we purify ourselves because we live in the hope that it’s all going to be completed someday, just not right now. Christian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins also imagined becoming a diamond. He wrote:
A beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; world’s wildfire leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.[2]
That’s how it will happen, “since he was what I am.” There’s Irenaeus again. There’s verse 2 again, “when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” Our hope calls us to “spit and polish” our souls, to try and see Jesus as clearly as possible, until we see Him as He really is and “In a flash, at a trumpet crash,” become diamonds.
It’s real hope. It’s not a message for a few spiritual athletes who can jump all the hurdles and race forward into a purity that all the rest of us never hope to reach. It’s for everyone. We can all look for Jesus. We can all want more and more to see Him and in seeing Him become like Him. Any of us, any old lump of coal, can be a diamond someday.
That’s what you really want. Don’t settle for something less. When I shared the ideas of this sermon with our worship team this week, Kendal shared with me a song I would never listen to on my own. It’s by a 90s punk rock band that’s still around and recording even now, Jimmy Eat World. In their song “Diamond,” they sing about working at being better and recite a list of things to do like meditating; working out or reading more; traveling, being more socially acceptable. Then the chorus comes in:
That’s how a diamond grows
You give yourself the right chance over time
Don’t believe them if they try to sell you something quicker
That’s how a diamond grows
It’s not the Gospel of course. It leaves out the wonderful grace of Jesus and how the Diamond He is became what we are, coal, so that we can become what He is, diamond. But Jimmy Eat World did understand how true diamonds get made. God makes diamonds and His children the same way, with “the right chance over time.” That ancient coal had to be put a hundred miles down for millions of years. That was its “right chance.” When Jesus died and rose again, He offered us our “right chance” to repent and be forgiven and start growing into diamonds.
You and I don’t just accept Jesus and fly off to heaven and become perfect in an instant. No, “Don’t believe them if they try to sell you something quicker.” That’s not how God does it. He leaves us down here, in all the pressure and heat of this world because “That’s how a diamond grows.” That’s our hope when this world seems so hard on us.
Maybe yesterday you committed the same old sin you’ve committed a hundred times. You feel like a dirty old lump of coal, but you can be a diamond someday. Maybe you haven’t been able to find a decent job. You feel worthless, but you will be a diamond someday. Maybe you’re lonely and feel like no one cares about you, but Christ your friend will make you a diamond someday. Maybe you’re older and frightened of the future, fearing a hospital bed or nursing home, but your ultimate future is diamond. In Jesus Christ, you will be a diamond.
Jesus takes the lumpiest lumps of coal and turns them into diamonds. Anyone can be a diamond in Christ. We live in that hope and we live better because of that hope. “Beloved we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.” Except that we will be pure as He is pure. We will be diamonds because He is.
As I said, Superman couldn’t actually squeeze dirty, impure coal into a beautiful diamond even if anyone was that strong. But God can. Jesus can. No one is beyond His power, no one is too dirty or too lumpy or too far gone. If you are discouraged, please remember that. He came to be like you, so that you could be like Him. Jesus came so that you can be a diamond someday. Live in that hope. Work toward that hope.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2021 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] According to Chesterton.org this quotation is actually from The World, the Flesh, and Father Smith, by Bruce Smith (1945), p. 108.
[2] From the poem, “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.”