John 1: 22 February 16, 2021
15(John testified to him and cried out,
‘This was he of whom I said, “He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because
he was before me.” ’) 16From his fullness we have all
received, grace upon grace. 17The law indeed was given through
Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18No one has
ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s
heart, who has made him known.
19 This
is the testimony given by John when the Jews sent priests and Levites from
Jerusalem to ask him, ‘Who are you?’ 20He confessed and did not
deny it, but confessed, ‘I am not the Messiah.’ 21And they
asked him, ‘What then? Are you Elijah?’ He said, ‘I am not.’ ‘Are you the
prophet?’ He answered, ‘No.’ 22Then they said to him, ‘Who are
you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about
yourself?’ 23He said,
‘I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness,
“Make straight the way of the Lord” ’,
as the prophet Isaiah said.
24 Now
they had been sent from the Pharisees. 25They asked him, ‘Why then are you
baptizing if you are neither the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the
prophet?’ 26John answered them, ‘I baptize with water. Among
you stands one whom you do not know, 27the one who is coming
after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.’ 28This
took place in Bethany across the Jordan where John was baptizing.
The
Pharisees, next round of experts come to see John to get some answers. These folks need to be distinguished from the
priests and Levites. Those guys were
from the establishment leadership, from the temple in Jerusalem. Politically, the High Priest was the most
powerful ‘accepted’ position among the Jewish people. The king was viewed as an outsider imposed
upon them. The High Priest is at the center
of the Jewish leadership.
The Pharisees
are a different group. They are still a
part of the ruling elite of the Jews, but not directly involved with the Temple
crowd. Rather, a Pharisee was a teacher
of the law, an expert in matters of Moses and the Old Testament. They seem to have arisen as leaders of the synagogues,
the meeting places for Jews on the Sabbath when not in Jerusalem. Jesus served in this role a number of times
when he would go into the synagogue on the Sabbath and interpret the
Scriptures.
It
seems this was a class of leaders seeking to keep the Jewish people informed
and living by the Law of Moses. They had
their own ways of doing things. The
gospels will record Jesus clashing with this class a lot because it appears
they used the Law to their own advantage, making themselves important in the
community around themselves, imposing their interpretation on how people should
understand their ‘bible’, the Old Testament.
Jesus,
identified as a ‘rabbi’, as a ‘teacher’, seems to find his roots in this
class. The way in which Jesus
interpreted the whole law, Love God and Love Neighbor, that finds its roots in
the teachings of a Pharisee. While not
necessarily political leaders, they were religious and cultural leaders. This goes into the difference between being
Jewish and being Christian.
Christianity
is a religious identity while Judaism is a religious identity, a cultural and
political identity as well. There are
secular Jews. A secular Christian is a non
sequitur. If the temple leadership was
concerned that the Jewish population followed the proper rites and ritual of
the Jewish faith, the Pharisees were concerned that the Jewish population
understood the wider implications of life and living as governed by the Jewish
faith.
These
various leadership castes mark the different groups operating at the time of Jesus. It is into this diverse ‘marketplace’ of
religious ideas that Jesus will be introducing his own, as part of the Plan of God. As I said, there will be no shortage of
conflict that is raised between Jesus and these various groups.
Pastor Peter
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