Jesus and John - Together in TRUST
Track 3
• illustration • The year was 155 AD,
and the place was Smyrna, in the
Roman province of Asia. There was a
new wave of persecution that was
sweeping against the Christian
church, and the proconsul of Smyrna
was especially vicious in his pursuit
and persecution of the followers of
Jesus. He focused on the bishop of
Smyrna, a man named Polycarp, who
was almost 100 years old. When the
Christians of Smyrna found out that
an arrest warrant had been issued for
Polycarp, they whisked him away
and hid him in a barn on a farm
outside of Smyrna. But the police
found him and brought him into the
city, to the center of an arena where
there were tens of thousands of
people screaming for his execution.
As the old man stood in the middle
of the arena, anticipating that soon
he would die, the proconsul had a
moment of sympathy for the old
man. He raised up his arm and
silenced the crowd. When everything
was quiet, the proconsul
shouted out, “Polycarp! Curse the
Christ and live!”
Polycarp, with an amazingly
strong voice, answered back,
“Eighty and six years have I served
my master and king, and he has
done me no wrong. I dare not blaspheme
him now.”
With that refusal to renounce his
faith in Jesus Christ, the proconsul
brought down his arm, and Polycarp
was executed as a Christian martyr.
I have often wondered, How did he
do that? How did he remain so trusting?
Where did he muster the faith and the strength
to be faithful to Jesus Christ under the worst
of circumstances?
I have a theory. The theory is that
it is something he learned from his
mentor; for the mentor of Polycarp
was the apostle John. And the apostle
John had had a most unusual relationship
with Jesus. For a while, there
were thousands who thronged around
Jesus and hundreds who were counted
as his broader network of disciples
and a dozen who were his closest
followers and three who were in his
inner circle. There was one who was
described as “the disciple whom Jesus
loved”—and that was John.
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John trusted Jesus.
It was a most extraordinary relationship.
It was extraordinary, I think, in
that John trusted Jesus in so many
ways. He trusted Jesus enough to
forsake prosperity.
If you connect the dots on the
biography of John, you discover in
Mark 1:20 that he lived in the home
of Zebedee, where they had servants.
This was a time when most everyone
was poor, and yet he was in a family
that owned their own fishing business
and had household servants to
take care of daily chores. When you
read on in the New Testament, in
John 18 and 19, you find they not
only had a business and a house up
north on Galilee Lake, but they also
had a city residence in the city of
Jerusalem. They have two houses at a
time when there was virtually no
middle class! And in John 18, you
discover this man had access to the
court and Caiaphas, the high priest.
So he was connected to the most
important people in society. Yet one
day he heard a call from this itinerant
rabbi from Nazareth, who said,
“Come and follow me.” And he
walked away from houses and business
and servants and wealth in order
to follow Jesus.
• illustration • A couple of years
ago, I was in one of the most populous
Muslim nations in the world—in
a city that probably most of us have
never heard of. In a restaurant in that
city, I met a couple from Ohio. I
introduced myself and began talking
with them. I said, “What are you
doing here?”
“We came to represent Jesus
Christ and to serve these people and
to communicate the love of God,”
they replied.
“So where are you from?” I asked.
They told me they were from
Columbus.
“What did you do before you
came here?” I asked.
One of them was a surgeon and
the other was a dentist, and they left
both of their practices behind—high
income, lucrative salaries, expensive
Jesus and John—Together to Trust
You trust Jesus; can Jesus trust you?
BY LEITH ANDERSON
audio
FAITHFULNESS; SELF-SACRIFICE; TRUST;WHOLEHEARTED DEVOTION / THE GOSPEL OF JOHN {ISSUE 288}
practices, enormous earning potential,
and a luxurious lifestyle—because there
are still people who, like John, trust
Jesus enough to forsake prosperity.
Track 5
But it wasn’t just that. John also
trusted Jesus enough to risk his life.
You may recall that when Jesus was
dying on the cross, there were many
women who came and surrounded
him at the foot of the cross. But
there was only one of his followers—
only one of the dozen who had spent
three years with him. The rest were
all holed up somewhere because they
were afraid they were next. There
could be a fourth or a fifth or a sixth
cross up on that hill, and they were
hiding to save their own skins. But not
John! John was the only one who
showed up, and he was willing to risk
his life because he trusted Jesus in
the worst of circumstances.
It is a comparatively easy thing to
trust in someone who is changing water
to wine and walking on the surface of the
sea and has crowds of thousands standing
there and cheering him while he feeds
them with minimal resources and when
he raises the dead, but when he’s stark
naked and crucified and the powerful
people of society have turned against
him, it’s a lot more difficult to show up
and trust. But that’s what John did; he
trusted Jesus enough to risk his life.
• illustration • There were five of us
traveling across the Sahel of Africa, just
south of the Sahara Desert. We had
started out in Niamey, Niger, and we
were working our way toward the
Dogon in Mali. We were traveling
through Burkina Faso in a Toyota Land
Cruiser—where the air conditioning was
broken and the temperature outside was
120 degrees plus. It was dusty and the
windows were open and it was hard to
carry on a conversation. There were
three people jammed in the back and
three of us in the front—the driver, our
guide, Judy Anderson, the wife of the
director for West Africa of the World
Relief Corporation, and I was at the
window seat. You could only talk to the
person right next to you because of the
road noise, and she told me a story that
made the whole trip worthwhile.
She said she had grown up as the
daughter of missionaries from the
Evangelical Covenant Church in the old
Congo. When she was a little girl, there
was a celebration held for the 100th
anniversary of the coming of Christian
missionaries to that part of the Congo.
She said in typical African fashion, it
was an all-day event; it started at sunrise,
went all the way until sunset. There was
food and music and speeches and parties
and a great time of memory and gettogether
and celebration.
She remembered that near the end of
the day, when it was almost dark and
time for everyone to go home, a very
old man asked if he could come and
speak to the gathered crowd. When he
came, he said, “There’s something I
know that no one else knows, and I’m
soon going to die. If I don’t tell you,
then I will take this to the grave with
me. A hundred years ago, when the
missionaries first came to our people, we
had never heard of their God or of their
Book or had seen anyone who had
looked anything like them. Our people
didn’t know whether to believe what
they had to say or not. So our leaders
got together, and they conspired to
come up with a test to find out the credibility
of these newcomers. The test was
they would poison one of them and see
how everybody reacted.”
What ensued was, one day a little girl
got sick, and her parents thought it was
an ordinary illness. But nothing they
could do—nothing in the missionary
medical book that they brought along—
seemed to cover this situation. Their
daughter, just a child—a preschooler—
got sicker and sicker, and she died. Here
they thought they had come to establish
a community, and they started out by
establishing a cemetery.
A few weeks later, a husband in
another family got sick, and it was a
similar sickness. He just got sicker and
sicker, and he died. Then the wife of the
third couple and another child. This old
man explained how they all died. His
people watched how they died and
decided the message must be true. It was
then, the old man said, that they
decided to follow Jesus.
Track 6
I think if I were them, I would have
come home. I would have called this off.
If my daughter died—if my wife died, if
my colleagues are going down—I’d get
out. But they trusted Jesus enough to risk
their lives, and enough to do it even if
nobody found out about it for 100 years!
That’s the way it was with John. He
trusted Jesus enough to forsake prosperity
and enough to risk his life and
enough to remain anonymous.
When you open your Bible to the
fourth Gospel, it says—depending on
the version you have—at the top of the
page, The Gospel According to St. John. You
know that’s not part of the Gospel!
That’s something an editor added. In
fact, when you read through that fourth
Gospel, you will never find John’s name
once. His name is never mentioned.
• illustration • For most of us, our
names are really important to us. Leith
is an unusual name. My mother is
from England. Leith is the seaport of
Edinburgh, Scotland. It’s like living in
the United States, being named Long
Beach or Hoboken or Port of Miami or
something like that. It’s an unusual name.
Most of you, at some time in your life,
have called someone else by your name.
You have said, “John” or “David” or
“Mary” or “Jane” or “Miguel” or “Ahmed.”
You have said your name to somebody
else. I have never done that once in my
entire life. When I was a college student,
I did meet someone else with this name,
and I never said it; I just could not bring
myself to do it. To this day, I cannot
understand how that person’s parents
could give my name—my name—to her.
We’re touchy about our names; we’re
sensitive. We want people to know who
we are. We want our names to be spelled
correctly. We want recognition. But
John was willing never to have his name
mentioned. If the name of Jesus became
prominent and was remembered for
history, that was good enough for him. If
his name was completely forgotten, that
was up to Jesus. By contrast, if his name
became so prominent that mothers and
fathers would name their sons after him
for 2,000 years, then so be it. That
would be entrusted to Jesus. John trusted
Jesus enough to forsake prosperity, risk
his life, and remain anonymous.
Track 7
Jesus trusted John.
You haven’t heard a thing you haven’t
heard before. You’ve heard this 10,000
times before. Do you trust Jesus? I hope
your answer is, each time, “Of course I do!
I trust Jesus as my Savior and Lord! I would
follow him anywhere! I’ll put my life at
risk—anything! I trust Jesus.” But there was
more to the relationship than that. It was
not just that John trusted Jesus. What was
amazing is that Jesus trusted John.
He trusted him with his gospel. You
learn in Bible classes there are four
Gospels. The first are the synoptics.
They are synonymous, similar to each
other—Matthew, Mark, and Luke. You
know that 95 percent of the Gospel of
Mark is verbatim—word-for-word the
same—with the Gospel of Matthew.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke are amazingly
similar and earlier in their writings. But
Jesus wanted someone to tell the rest of
the story. He wanted to include information
like the marriage feast at Cana,
when the water was changed to wine, or
what was whispered at the table at the
Last Supper—information not fully
included in those other Gospels. He
needed someone who would get it right.
And there’s one man he knew he could
trust, and that was John.
In the closing line of John’s Gospel, it
says, “If everything else that Jesus did
were written down, I suppose the world
itself could not contain the books.” Talk
about an editorial challenge! He had an
entire world full of things that Jesus did
and had to narrow it down to 21 chapters!
Jesus had to trust someone who
would exclude miracles he performed
and exclude teachings he made and
include what needed to be included. But
John got it right, and it’s because John
got it right that we can say, “God so
loved the world that he gave his one and
only Son, so that whoever believes in
him should not perish but have eternal
life.” If John hadn’t been trustworthy, we
wouldn’t have John 3:16.
Track 8
It’s an amazing thing to be trusted
with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus
trusted John with his gospel—and with
his love. I’m a little uncomfortable, actually,
reminding you how John is
described in the New Testament. He’s
described as “the disciple whom Jesus
loved.” I want to think that Jesus loves
everybody exactly the same, but there is
a clear implication that John was special
and different—that he was Jesus’s best
friend. And Jesus, in his humanity, has as
much right to a best friend as any of us.
We have best friends! A best friend is
someone you can tell something to that
you would never tell anyone else. It’s the
person with whom you can share the
very core of your soul and your deepest
secrets—and you’ll still be accepted and
you’ll still be okay. Jesus needed that
kind of friend.
But think of the potential for abuse!
What if John decided he was going to ask
for special favors from the Son of God?
But Jesus knew he could trust him—that
he wouldn’t abuse the relationship.
• illustration • Imagine if somehow,
out of all of us in this room, Jesus were
to put us in rank order in terms of who
he likes the best and the least. And
imagine if you came out number one.
God loves everybody, but you’re his
favorite. What are you going to do as
soon as chapel is over? You know what
you’re going to do—you’re going to go
on MySpace.com and say, “Jesus loves
me more than anybody else; I’m his
favorite.” You’re going to write a book or
you’re going to come out with a CD and
go on tour. Think of the potential that is
in this!
But Jesus could trust John, that he
wouldn’t take inappropriate advantage of
what has got to be one of the most
amazing statements and relationships we
could ever imagine: “the disciple whom
he loved.”
Track 9
Jesus trusted John with his gospel and
with his love—and with his mother. When
Jesus was crucified, he suffered what
thousands of others suffered. Crucifixion
was a terrible form of capital punishment,
invented by the Phoenicians and
perfected by the Romans. We know a lot
about crucifixion. We know that sometimes
people, like Jesus, were almost
beaten to death before they were crucified.
Then, when they were taken to the
cross, the cross was put down on the
ground and the executioners followed a
common routine. Holding the man
down—for it was almost always men,
and not women, who were crucified—
the executioner would first bend the
elbow and hold the hand down, feeling
for the soft spot. Every one of us has
this—a soft spot at the base of the wrist,
between our bones. When that soft spot
was found, the executioner would take a
spike and a sledge and drive the spike
through that soft spot, so that no bones
were broken. He would do the same to
the opposite elbow. Then he would
move on to the legs, always bending
them at the knees, driving either a single
or two spikes through the feet. Then the
executioners would lift up the cross, and
they would drop it into a prepared
socket in the ground.
Then crucifixion proceeded.
Sometimes it lasted for days. Sometimes
people would die of thirst. It was an
assault from insects and severe sunburn.
But most men who were crucified didn’t
die from exposure or loss of blood; they
died from asphyxiation. In a Journal of the
American Medical Association article,
modern physicians have told us the man
who was crucified would hang by his
wrists until paralysis would come down
his arms and across his pectoral muscles,
making it impossible to exhale. He could
bring in a breath, but you know the
horrible fear that comes when you can’t
breathe; he couldn’t get the breath back
out. The man being executed would
then push up on his feet and straighten
his legs. That would relieve the pressure
on his arms and pectoral muscles long
enough that he could get his breath back
out again. But the excruciating pain of
putting all the body’s weight on one’s
feet was so horrible, it couldn’t be maintained.
The crucified man would then
drop back down, staying there until the
paralysis forced him to push back up.
Track 10
I describe all of that to say those who
were being crucified didn’t talk much
because they couldn’t. They spoke
seldom and little. That’s why Jesus spoke
only seven times during the entire crucifixion.
One of those times is recorded in
John 19: “Near the cross of Jesus stood
his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the
wife of Cleopas, and Mary Magdalene.
When Jesus saw his mother there, and
the disciple whom he loved standing
nearby, he said to his mother, ‘Dear
woman, here is your son,’ and to the
disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’” From
that time on, this disciple took her into
his home.
Jesus came into a culture and a
language, and in that culture, it was
expected that the eldest son would
take care of his widowed mother until
she died; but Jesus couldn’t, and his
own brothers weren’t there. So he just
needed somebody to take care of his
mother in his absence. There was one
man whom he knew he could trust,
and that was John.
The ancient traditions tell us that
when the disciples spread out—when
Peter went to Rome, when Thomas went
to India, when they went to Africa and
across the Roman Empire—John stayed
put in Jerusalem until Mary died, so he
could fulfill the trust of Jesus.
Track 11
You trust Jesus; can Jesus trust you?
You’ve been asked 10,000 times: “Do
you trust Jesus?” And I hope you say, “I
do; I trust.” But let there be this one time
when the question is asked, “Can Jesus
trust you?” Can he trust you with his
gospel? Because he needs people he can
trust to tell the story today. He needs
people he can trust in the best of places
and the worst of places. He needs
people who will demonstrate what it
means to be a Christian with good looks
and a healthy body and a long life, and
people who struggle with disabilities and
difficulties and chronic illnesses and are
still faithful to him. He needs those who
will go to the easy places and those who
will go to the successful places. He
needs those who will be faithful to him
and trustworthy in the heat of the
moment of sexual temptation and still be
pure. Jesus needs those who will marry
and have children and fulfill every
parent’s dream that these will be children
who have straight As, straight
teeth, and a straight sexual orientation.
But who can he trust to be the Christian
mother and father of a prodigal daughter
or wayward son? Can Jesus trust you?
Let the answer be, “Yes, we trust
Jesus.” And let the answer be, “Yes, Jesus,
you can trust us.”