Sermon Tone Analysis

Exegetical Point: Jesus has authority to do what he is doing because he is working for God the Father.

The Son is the agent of the Father and thus the Judge & life giver.

Homiletic Point:

Intro

Who was at church last week and can tell me about what Jesus did?

healed the disabled man

The Jewish authorities didn’t like this, you know why?

Because Jesus did it on the Sabbath!

And made the man carry his sleeping mat.

Waaaaay back in the past, the Jews had been very bad at obeying God and resting on the Sabbaths.

God had made good rules for the people to help them rest and rely on God.

But they ignored God, and they did what they wanted instead of listening to him.

So, there was consequences for the Jewish people, so they were very sorry for the way they had disobeyed God.

They didn’t want to consequences again, so they tried to follow the rules really hard.

God had told them not to work on the sabbath, so they became very strict about following the rules.

In fact, they invented rules to go on top of God’s rules!

God said you can’t work on the Sabbath, but the Jews made up rules that said you can’t even carry your sleeping bag on the Sabbath!

Imagine that!

If you went camping you wouldn’t be allowed to move your swag!

When God made the rule about not working on the sabbath, he made it to help people rest in God and rely on Him, not to make it super strict and have lots of tiny rules to follow.

God wanted their hearts to rest in their savior.

Last week in the story Jesus healed a man on the Sabbath, and he told the man to take his swag with him.

When the Jewish leaders found this man walking with his swag, they became very upset with Jesus.

They thought that Jesus was dishonoring God by healing on the Sabbath and by telling the man to take his sleeping mat with him.

They had confused the rules they had invented themselves, with God’s rules.

But, in our passage this week, Jesus tells the Jewish leaders that He knows what God wants, and in fact Jesus tells them that He will Judge everybody.

Jesus will be the one who says who has done what God wants, and who deserves consequences for being an enemy of God.

This makes the Jewish leaders reaaaaaaaaaallllly mad!

They get so mad that they try to kill Jesus.

They think that they know better than Jesus, but Jesus knows better than them, because Jesus is the Son of God.

He knows what God wants him to do!

If you want to follow along for the rest of the message, there will be 5 big points.

See if you can catch them all!

You see everyone, this passage flows on from the healing in the start of chapter 5. Chapter 5 is one big unit, but there is so much in it that we need to break it down into more manageable units to get into the meat of this wonderful passage.

It’s so dense!

In essence, the Jewish leaders have brought 2 charges against Jesus, which we’ll see in a moment are: Sabbath breaking & Blasphemy.

And the bulk of this passage is Jesus defense: I’m doing God’s work, and I have the authority to do it.

This is fantastic, because often when people challenge Jesus he side-steps their questions to get to their heart, here, John records for us the almost direct response to the challenge by showing that God the Father and Jesus the Son of God are connected so integrally that Jesus has every right to do what he has been doing, and then some!

This defense is broken down into 5 main ideas.

5 ways Jesus is inseparably connected to the Father.

The Father Works, Jesus Works

SO lets get stuck in to v16 which sets the scene:

So initially they’re persecuting because of the activities on the Sabbath, so Jesus responds basically saying: “You think I’m disobeying God? Nope, I’m following God my Father’s example.”

God never takes a break from his “work” upholding the universe and redeeming His people!

Now, in the beginning God had done his creative work in the 6 days of creation, and then on the 7th he rested from his creative work.

He made that day holy.

He set a pattern for God’s people to follow.

But,

God did not stop being God on that 7th day!

He didn’t stop maintaining the universe.

He didn’t give up caring for His world or enacting his sovereign plans.

In that sense God never stops working.

SO here, Jesus is essentially saying, “If you consider healing and carrying your sleeping bag to be “work”, then God himself has never rested from “work”.

In that definition, God has always been at work!

And Now I’m doing the same work as my Dad.”

This really stirs the pot!

How do they react?

This was enough to push them to try and execute Jesus.

They thought this kind of talk was so bad, and so wicked that they had to take him out.

Interestingly, later on Jesus will make a reference to the way that the Jewish people are trying to kill him and they say “you’re crazy, no one is trying to kill you!”

Yet here they are, trying to kill Jesus because they understood the implications of what he was saying.

By claiming to be the Son of God, by claiming this divine parentage, he was claiming a divine status.

There are only two ways to receive this kind of message - either it is a) true, and thus they would have to accept Jesus words and authority, or b) it is false and he is uttering shameful blasphemy and ought to be put to death.

The Jewish leaders are choosing B. They want to take him out because of this perceived blasphemy and sabbath breaking.

You can empathize with those leaders.

They’re set in their ways and beliefs.

They think they know how the world works and what God is like, and what He expects from them.

In order to receive the truth they would have to have major surgery done to their worldview.

Even these people who have grown up listening to God’s word, and who are trying to please God, have misunderstandings and faulty doctrine.

They needed to be humbled and hear from God.

They needed to be reborn by the Spirit so the could accept truth from God, but they were stubborn, to the point of trying to kill God’s annointed Son.

You and I brothers and sisters run the risk of becoming these Jewish leaders, so close to the God’s kingdom, yet so far away.

We must be humbled, we must be brought low to have God’s truth shape our worldview.

We need to have our faulty preconceptions undone.

It hurts!

It’s hard to see so much of what you thought was true to fall in a heap.

It’s hard to admit you were wrong.

It’s what each true believer must do before they can really receive what God has said through his Son.

That Son of God has come at the behest of God the father.

God the Son was at work among those Jews doing exactly what God the Father wanted him to do.

They work in unison so that we can say the God the Father has worked, when God the Son works.

This leads us to the next point which is that not only is Jesus the Son, working like his father is working, but the Father Shows the Son what to do, and he does it!

The Father Shows, the Son Does

Jesus pushes his point that he is acting on God’s behalf in his response to the Jewish leader’s astonishment:

Jesus is definitively saying that His authority to act on the Sabbath is directly from God: “God the Father wanted me, His Son, to heal that man on the Sabbath, and to tell him to take his sleeping mat with him.

I never act without my Father’s instruction.”

They are deeply connected, so that everything the Son does or doesn’t do is based on what the Father has shown him.

there is a 1 to 1 correlation between Jesus action and the revelation from the Father.

I’ve worked for many hears in civil construction, and following the plans is the key part of the contractors job.

But sometimes there will be unexpected issues that come up, there’s an unexpected pipe there, the soil isn’t as good quality as we though it was, there’s ruck under the soil so we can’t dig trenches, etc.

So we end up with variations.

What we put on the plan is not always what is built.

Not so when it comes to Jesus and the Father.

There is no variation between what the father has laid out, and what the Son does.

One to one!

The Father and the Son, these two persons of the God head are in beautiful loving union.

All good fathers love their sons and treasure them, and this is only a shadow of the truest Father-Son relationship that exists in the Godhead!

This love is and integral part of this redemptive work that Jesus is doing.

Lets look:

Jesus has an intimate knowledge of what God the Father is doing.