Don't Be Astonished, Jesus Says, I Talk to the Dead and They Hear Me

May 10, 2021              John 5: 28-29

 ²⁴Very truly, I tell you, anyone who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life, and does not come under judgment, but has passed from death to life. ²⁵“Very truly, I tell you, the hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. ²⁶For just as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself; ²⁷and he has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man. ²⁸Do not be astonished at this; for the hour is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice ²⁹and will come out—those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation. ³⁰“I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge; and my judgment is just, because I seek to do not my own will but the will of him who sent me.

³¹“If I testify about myself, my testimony is not true. ³²There is another who testifies on my behalf, and I know that his testimony to me is true.

            So what is the most astonishing thing here?  Assuming Jesus is adding this observation since his last “Very Truly I Tell You”, so it is in this important piece?  Is it the dead who are going to hear things?  Is it about the life that is in the Father, the creative life invested in us at creation that is now passed to Jesus?  Is it the authority of judgement that has been passed along to the Son of Man? 

            Frankly, Jesus has already commented on how judgement has passed to the Son of Man.  He has done a few pieces identifying how the Father and the Son are, as he will put it, abiding in one another.  I think it is about the dead people.  As Jesus goes on to say, “the hour is coming when all who are in the graves will hear his voice”-the voice of the Son of Man.  While he is not powerfully explicit about it, from what we know, the dead will hear his voice speak to them from the grave, because Jesus is going to die.  He is also headed ‘downstairs’, descending into hell according to the Apostle’s Creed.  And if the ‘hour’ that is coming is reference to the moment of the Passion of The Christ, this stuff all begins to tie together. 

            All who are in their graves will hear his voice…the collective ‘passed away’ from the beginning of creation.  This is the judgement of Jesus sweeping back over the flow of history.  This is Godly stuff here.  God created time, God is NOT bound by time.  So the Plan of God is to ‘insert’ the death and resurrection of Jesus as a time-bound event-because of us, those created in the temporal structure of creation but it is one event for all, beginning to end.  Confusing?  Well, thank God that God has a handle on it.

            And we are given to understand why they are coming out.  There are two categories of resurrection, to life for the good, to condemnation for the evil.  Again, this is in divine terms, good and evil, a dualistic view of the world, no shades of ‘maybe’ behavior in between.

            So here’s where things can get interesting.  To track through the gospel of John, is it to see a development in the theology of God’s Plan as Jesus lays it out for us?  Because we can easily come to the book with the full plan of God, laid out from the Birth of Jesus, through Jesus’ death and resurrection, to His ascension, and looking forward to His coming again, against which we measure every passage.

            But Jesus has not laid out the entire case of His death and resurrection as yet.  What we are first receiving is that Jesus is God and what Jesus has received from God the Father as the Son of God and the Son of Man.  And we know there is a relationship between God and Man, and Humanity, built into the Sonship.  And it has to do with the Messiahship, and Jesus as Christ-which means the Anointed One. 

            Read this verse without the context of the rest of John and the Bible and it looks like we are judged on merit.  Good versus Evil.  All we need is the formula to figure out how good can outweigh the other.  Except for one problem.  Sin.  But before we can talk meaningfully about sin, we need to understand the balance. 

            But the astonishing thing is that the dead are going to hear Jesus’ call.  More later.

Peace, Pastor Peter