May 12, 2019 “Trust or Idolatry?” – John 10:22-30

John 10:22-30
“Trust or Idolatry?”
May 12, 2019 – Fourth Sunday of Easter

Beth and I were buying our first television set as a couple. Lots of research went into that purchase. It was before the Internet, so we read Consumer Reports, visited several different stores, and listened to advice from friends. We finally made the decision, pointed out our choice to the salesman, and got out the checkbook. Then he said, “Of course you’ll want the extended warranty with that.”

Our research hadn’t really prepared us for that question, but I said, “We’re buying this brand because it’s supposedly the best. Why would we need an extended warranty?” His reply was, “Trust me. We wouldn’t be offering it if it wasn’t a good idea.” I decided not to trust him. We turned down the extra warranty. It was a good decision. A few years later that television came with us to Eugene and worked fine for another decade. That warranty would have been wasted money.

How do you decide whom to trust? In our text for today, the Jewish religious authorities had pretty much decided not to trust Jesus. It was not such a good decision. The first couple of verses tell us it was winter, December, the time of “the festival of the Dedication,” which is now called Hanukkah. Rather than walking and teaching outside, Jesus was in the sheltered area of Solomon’s porch. And the cool weather was reflected in the cold hearts of the Jewish authorities who chose that place to confront Jesus. They were suspicious. They didn’t trust Him and said as much with a skeptical question in verse 24, asking Jesus to say plainly whether He was the Messiah.

Remembering those people’s negative emotion toward Jesus is a good point at which to say that this Sunday and the next two, we’ll be thinking together about emotions. Kendal prompted me last fall to consider a series about emotions while I was planning sermons for this year. In fact, he’s going to bring you next week’s message. Emotions are ways of looking at the world which are wired into us by the way we were created. Though they can at times overwhelm us, feelings also guide and motivate us. So Kendal and I are going to look at different aspects of a few emotions we may not think too much about, at least not often in relation to our faith. This Sunday I’m letting this Gospel lesson guide us in considering feelings of genuine trust versus naïve idolatry.

At first blush, we might think the feelings those religious leaders had toward Jesus were understandable. They were right to question Him, to not simply jump into complete trust, like I was wise not to completely trust that salesperson who wanted to sell me an extra warranty. I said to the children and to all of you a couple weeks ago that it was O.K. for the disciple Thomas to ask questions and wonder if Jesus was really risen from the dead until he had actually seen Jesus for himself. Weren’t these Pharisees, or whoever they were, wise to withhold their trust? Not exactly.

It was O.K. for Thomas to question, but if he had kept on doubting Jesus’ resurrection once he had seen Him, that would have been foolish. That’s why when in verse 24, the Jewish leaders ask Jesus, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly,” Jesus replies in verses 25 and 26, “I have told you and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me; but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep.”

The Jews here have all the evidence they need to trust Jesus. They’ve seen or heard that He has fed a huge crowd and that he has healed the sick, including a man blind from birth. Soon they are going to learn that He can raise someone from the dead. But they keep refusing to trust Him, despite the miracles, despite His character, which only does good rather than harm. That’s not healthy skepticism. It’s a failure to trust someone who is eminently trustworthy.

I need to say here that the Gospel of John talks often about “the Jews” as being those who oppose Jesus and do not believe in Him. In these days of a renewed and ugly anti-Semitism, we need to be clear that what this Gospel means by “the Jews” is what I’ve been saying: some Jewish religious authorities, some Jewish leaders, perhaps the power structure of Jerusalem. It’s not the Jewish people in general. Jesus was a Jew. So was His mother. The disciples were Jews. The very first people to believe and trust in Jesus were Jewish.

John is simply using a phrase for Jesus’ opponents that, unfortunately, sounds anti-Semitic in our current climate. But he never meant us to imagine that Jews in general cannot trust in Jesus or belong to His flock. He never meant us to think that being Jewish is somehow wrong or bad in and of itself. That is a terrible perversion of Christian thinking. Many of us thought it disappeared at the end of WWII, but it seems to on the rise again. May God save all His people, both Jews and Christians, from such perverted prejudice.

In fact, thinking about how anti-Semitism got hold of an entire nation in the twentieth century shows us how trust itself can be perverted into something else. When trust or faith that properly belongs to God gets focused in the wrong direction, it turns into idolatry. If we place unquestioning trust in a political leader or in a form of government or in an economic theory or in a scientific theory, or in any sort of less than perfect person or idea, those things which can be good turn into idols, objects of worship which take the place of God.

Trust is a balancing act. Directed properly, trust is a beautiful emotion, a good way to view the world, those around us, and God. But when trust gets aimed at an untrustworthy object, then that object may become an idol. Trust between husband and wife is a wonderful thing. But when one of those spouses is an abuser or an adulterer, then continued trust is a mistake. It’s really sad, but abused partners can idolize their abusers in such a way that they foolishly accept apologies and continue trusting those who hurt them, setting themselves up for yet another round of abuse.

As Ken Wytsma, our speaker Friday evening, said to us, even Jesus or God can become an idol when what we are trusting in, believing in, is not the true Jesus or God, but our idea of what God or Jesus is like. Ken quoted C. S. Lewis in his book A Grief Observed, as Lewis realized that what I think about God is not necessarily God. My ideas about God can be an idol that God has to shatter from time to time.

That’s what was happening for the Jewish authorities who opposed Jesus. He was shattering their ideas of what God was like. Instead of a rigid lawgiver who sternly punishes every infraction, God is a forgiving Father who welcomes sinners home. Instead of a pure and righteous deity who has nothing to do with those outside His people, God is a loving Shepherd seeking out the lost sheep and bringing them together. Jesus was the living expression of that true idea of God in human form.

That was the big question “the Jews” faced as they encountered Jesus. Were they willing to let their idols, their false ideas about God, be shattered and replaced with the truth Jesus showed them, or were they going to hang onto their idols and push themselves away from Jesus and thus away from God?

You can see Jewish authorities facing that question in the three verses just before our text. Jesus has been telling them that He is the Good Shepherd. Verse 19 says “the Jews were divided because of these words [about being the Good Shepherd who lays down His life for the sheep].” And verse 20 goes on, “Many of them were saying, ‘He has a demon and is out of his mind. Why listen to him?’” Then verse 21, “Others were saying, ‘These are not the words of one who has a demon. Can a demon open the eyes of the blind?’”

They had enough information then to trust Jesus. He did miracles and taught truth. But some persisted in their lack of trust. They preferred their idols, their own ideas of God. It may be that those ideas gave them power over other people. So they rejected Jesus and claimed He was the opposite of who He said He was, the devil rather than God. But as Jesus says in our text in verse 27, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them and they follow me.” Those were the ones who recognized Jesus’ power and heard the truth spoken in His voice. They were the ones who trusted Him.

You and I have enough information here in the Bible to trust Jesus. We really do. We have the record that He not only did miracles but that He Himself is the greatest miracle of all. He is God come to us as a human being. He rose from the dead. We have the words of Jesus written down for us so that we can read them for ourselves and hear His voice and recognize the truth in what He says. Even those who do not believe in Jesus will often acknowledge that the things He said about forgiveness and loving your neighbor and caring for those in need are a perfect prescription for human life.

The issue then, for you and me, is whether we will really trust Jesus and be part of His flock, be sheep who know His voice and do what He taught. Or will we make up and trust our own ideas of who Jesus is and follow those idols instead? Will we trust Jesus who blessed the poor or will we listen to an idol who blesses the rich? Will we trust Jesus who forgave sinners and loved foreigners or will we follow an idol who tells us it’s all right to seek revenge and exclude those who are different from us? Will we trust Jesus who tells us in verse 28 that He gives us eternal life or will we trust an idol who warns us to get everything we can now in this life?

Giving up false and idolatrous ideas of God and particularly of Jesus is part of growing more mature as a Christian. Our relationship with Jesus in that respect is similar, in a limited way, to our relationship with our own human parents. Today some of us have offered out loud thanks and praise for the blessings our mothers or other people have been in our lives. If we took all those accolades for our mothers at face value or as we might have when we were very young, you might get the idea that a bunch of us had perfect, wonderful mothers. Yet part of what we learn as we grow up is that our parents are human too, with their own limitations and failings. Instead of an idealized, “can-do-no-wrong” image of our mother or father, we begin to have a picture of those precious people that is more realistic.

Of course, growing up with Jesus and adjusting our image of Him to be more realistic is not a matter of discovering His limitations and faults. But it does mean learning the limitations and faults of our own thoughts about Jesus and His perfection. We learn, for instance, that the perfect love of Jesus does not mean that He grants all our wishes as if He were a fairy godmother. And if I’m growing in my relationship with Jesus, trusting and following Him, then I will discover that the fact Jesus loves me, despite all my own failings and, sin means that He loves lots of other sinful people I may not like, and that He expects me to get over that and love them too like He does.

A “Jesus” who loves all the people I like and condemns all the people I don’t like is not the real Jesus. I would be very wise not to trust that “Jesus,” no matter how attractive He seems. He is almost certainly an idol. Instead, if I see a Jesus more like the one described here in the Bible, a Jesus who loves people who just annoy me, then I think I would do well to trust Him, to listen to Him, to follow Him.

There is a blessed and wonderful promise here as we discover more and more who the real Jesus is and place our trust in Him. In verses 28, Jesus says of His sheep, of those who trust and follow Him, “I give them eternal life and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.” Talk about your extended warranties! Trust in Jesus will never fail you. He may not live up to all your false and idolatrous expectations, but He will certainly giving you something better than those idols. He will keep you safely with Him so that nothing and no one can take you away from Him.

In the last couple of verses of our text, Jesus tells us the ultimate reason He can be trusted. What Jesus the Son of God can do is based on what God the Father does. No one can take anything away from God, so no one can take you away from Jesus. In fact, in verse 30 Jesus told His opponents and tells us, “The Father and I are one.” God cannot die or lie. He will never leave us in the lurch. We can trust Him forever. So you can trust Jesus. And I hope you will, just like these two young people who coming to be baptized today because they trust Jesus. He will be faithful to them for the rest of their lives and forever. He will be the same for you. Trust Him.

Amen.