Preached · December 14, 2014
Text · John 1
Well, as Rachel alluded to, today's passage is from the book of John, chapter 1, and we're talking about John the Baptist — talking about something that he said that maybe we could all put on our lips every so often, maybe a little bit more often.
How many of you here have ever heard of the Messiah — or a Messiah complex, or a Savior complex? There's this story, comes out of Michigan — true story — about a couple of guys named Leon and Clyde, and they suffered from an actually diagnosable Messiah complex. They were chronically ill, delusional patients at a mental health facility, and they were diagnosed with a psychotic delusional disorder. They truly, literally believed that they were Jesus Christ. So a psychiatrist put them into a small group together, and in one group session Leon, one of these patients, claimed, "I'm the Messiah, the Son of God. I am on a mission. I was sent to save the world." And the psychologist asked, "Well, how do you know?" And Leon said, "God told me." And Clyde said, "I didn't tell you that."
Now, a Messiah complex, boiled down, is this idea that we are meant, or purposed, to save everything. Each of us maybe suffers this to varying degrees — this idea that our purpose in life is to fix things, to save people. And Leon and Clyde are not the first to claim to be the literal Messiah.
Jewish Background
So, to give you a little bit of background first into John chapter 1: remember that we're in the first century AD, in the land of Israel — or Palestine — while it's been conquered by the Romans. Israel, as we've talked about many times, has had a pretty checkered history. They've been exiled, they've been enslaved, they've been conquered; they've had conqueror after conqueror, ruler after ruler. And throughout all of these conquerings, there have always been these prophecies that go alongside. Prophecies about a prophet like Moses, someone who would come and bring Israel back to faithfulness to God. Or a prophecy about the return of Elijah, this great prophet — there are these prophecies that Elijah would return. And the most famous, probably the most talked-about prophecies in first-century Palestine and Israel, was the idea of the Messiah, or the Christ, meaning the Anointed One. Some sort of king or figure who would come and rule Israel once again with justice and righteousness as the foundation of his throne — and this king, this Messiah, this Anointed One, this Christ, would therefore throw off all of Israel's conquerors and rulers and pagan kings.
The Jews were looking forward to this time, what they called the Eschaton, or the Apocalypse, or the End of the Age. When we hear these words, we kind of get these gloom-and-doom, 2012-style prophecies in mind, everything going to hell in a handbasket, so to speak. But from a Jewish perspective, the Eschaton, the End of the Age, was good news. It was bad news for the unjust; it was bad news for the rulers and whoever had conquered them. But it was good news for the Jews, because this meant that Messiah had come, that their king had returned.
Now, many people had taken the title or claimed to be Messiah. This was not completely original. People had read these prophecies and looked at their own life and thought, "Hey, I could do that." They thought they could speed things along, take things into their own hands, and make God's will happen faster. They would claim that if we could just get rid of our current conquerors, we could make the Eschaton come — we could make the Apocalypse happen and everything would be right again.
I made a chart of all sorts of different people who have done this in history. We've got Simon, and Anthrong, and Judas, and Menahem, and Thudius, and Simon, and Lucas. Did they propose an overthrow of the Romans? Yep, all of them did. Were they all tortured and killed by the Romans? Yep, every single one. And did any of them come back to life? No. Good to know. Now, there's one exception to that rule, and we'll talk about him a little bit later.
John Chapter 1
So that's the background of John chapter 1. John the Baptist is a cousin of Jesus of Nazareth, born of Elizabeth, Mary's cousin. He comes onto the scene and starts preaching by the Jordan River, and he starts baptizing people, saying that the kingdom of heaven — God's reign, God's rule — is at hand. That's his claim. And he's dressed funny: he's wearing camel hair. And he eats funny: he eats locusts and honey. And people start thinking, could this be the one? Could this be the Messiah?
So John chapter 1 has this little bit of dialogue back and forth between some religious leaders and John. I want to have a little bit of fun — we're going to do some reader's theater. I'll be the narrator. Everybody on this side, you're going to be the priests and Levites; you'll read their quotations. And everybody on this side, you're going to be John the Baptist. This is John chapter 1:
This is the testimony given by John when the Pharisees sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, "Who are you?" He confessed and did not deny it, but confessed, "I am not the Messiah." And they asked him, "What then? Are you Elijah?" He said, "I am not." "Are you the Prophet?" He answered, "No." Then they said to him, "Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?" He said, "I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, 'Make straight the way of the Lord,'" as the prophet Isaiah said.
That's the passage of Scripture we took a look at last week in our readings.
Now, the book of Luke also tells us that the people were filled with expectation. They had this hope, this possibility, that maybe John the Baptist was the one. Because when there's someone claiming that the kingdom of heaven is at hand, that God's reign is about to happen, then people might get excited — or they might get suspicious, as maybe some of the leaders were. Because when someone claims to be Messiah, there is certain to be Roman bloodshed and torture and rebellion-crushing pretty close at hand.
So the leaders of the Jewish people come out to ask John point-blank: are you the Messiah? And John is presented with a choice. John would be just as prone to temptation, just as prone to deception, as the rest of us — or perhaps as the rest of the other people who would claim to be Messiah. Because he's a successful dude. He's got crowds of people coming to his ministry, coming to be baptized by him. And it would be very easy for him to say, "Well, maybe, maybe I am."
And we know that John didn't have this perfect knowledge, because later on in the Gospels, while John the Baptist is in prison, he's heard about Jesus' ministry and Jesus' healing and preaching — but Jesus hasn't said anything about a violent overthrow of the Romans, hasn't said anything about setting up a kingdom or taking up the throne in Jerusalem. So John the Baptist sends somebody and asks, "Jesus, are you the Messiah, or are we supposed to wait for someone else?"
So when John's at the height of his ministry — baptizing literally crowds of people, standing up to corrupt tax collectors and powerful Roman soldiers and the political and religious elite of his day — he gets asked the question: who are you?
The False Self
Now, this is the question we get asked every single day. It comes externally, people asking, "Who are you?" And it comes internally: "Who am I?" The external question comes from people and their demands of us: What will we do for people? How will we make them happy, or comfortable, or fix their problems, or get out of their way? And internally we ask, "Who am I?" — coming from our God-given longing for identity and belonging. What's my purpose? What am I supposed to do with my life? What am I supposed to do with this hour?
And we're tempted to answer these questions poorly, self-destructively. As we talked about in our Emotionally Healthy series, we tend to define our answers to these questions by what we do, and what we have, and what others think of us. These two sets of dialogues — the external and the internal, the "who are you" and the "who am I" — talk to each other, and we tend to answer them badly, because we're fallen, we're prone to wander, prone to meander from truth.
The apostle Paul has a phrase for this. He calls it the old self, or, as Christian writers have written about for centuries, the false self. The false self is whenever we are self-referenced rather than God-referenced — whenever we make our lives more about us rather than the one who created us. This is the way Robert Mulholland defines the false self. He writes:
The essence of the false self is in the original temptation — "You eat this fruit, you will be like God," from Genesis 3. The temptation to take over God's role in our life is the essence of the false self. The false self is a self that in some way is playing God in its life, in its world.
And some of us may balk at this definition or claim, "Who here has played God? I've never tried to do that." But I'd like to put forth that we have. Have we ever tried to manipulate somebody into thinking the way we think, or doing the things we want them to do? Have we ever tried to force someone to be happy? Have we ever tried to hide our mistakes and our flaws? Have we ever lashed out when we've been challenged, or questioned, or hurt? This is, in essence, the false self. Whenever we attempt to control what is not ours to control, particularly so it benefits us — so we care about our own concerns over the cares of others, someone's happiness, someone's perception of us, someone's opinion of our abilities and character — that's when our false self, our God-playing side, springs into action.
Now, I have a love of knowing about all kinds of things: actors and directors and constellations and subatomic particles and authors and big words. I love trivia games. I love trying to prove the people on Jeopardy wrong. I'm that kind of obnoxious person. I'm real fun at parties. And whenever somebody asks me, "Hey, have you heard of...," I get this little thrill down my spine when I can say, "Yes." "Have you heard of...?" Yes. "Hey, have you read...?" Yes. "Did you know...?" Absolutely I did, and I can tell you more about it than you can.
One time I got into a heated debate that The Patriot — Mel Gibson's movie from, I don't know, 10 or 15 years ago — was based on a true story. I had made this claim, "Oh yeah, it's based on a true story," and he challenged me on it. So I just started making up all sorts of facts that weren't true, because I didn't want him to know that I was wrong about something. It gets to the point that somebody asks, "Have you heard of...?" and I'll say yes automatically, just to make sure I'm impressing somebody, that I'm proving myself worthy, proving myself smart enough — even though I'm just lying through my teeth. This is an example of the false self. When we put on an image, a mask, and we try to play God in someone's perception of us, that's the false self.
But this is what Paul says about all this in Colossians chapter 3 — and this is kind of a paraphrase, but essentially he says this: Stop trying to deceive other people about who you really are. Stop lying to each other. Don't you remember that your old, false self has already been stripped away like rags, and the ragged way of life that goes with it? You've been clothed with a new, true self that is being continually kept new and transformed by intimately knowing the God who made you.
There's a way of life that gets asked the question "Who are you?" and responds with a self-referenced, false-self-based answer: "I'm the Messiah. I'm God. I can fix any problem. I can make everyone happy. I can avoid all pain. I never make mistakes — and if I ever have, it's because it's someone else's fault. What I do, what I own, what others think of me — that's what makes God pleased with me. If you have a wrong opinion about me, or the way I live my life, or the way I raise my kids, or the way I treat my spouse, or the way I spend my money or use my body, I can either manipulate you into thinking the way I want you to think, or I can punish you for disagreeing with me. What I cannot control makes me anxious or angry or depressed. And what I can control, I will take steps to make sure that no one else can. Who am I? I am the Messiah, and I am God."
And we don't always put it in such bald terms. But when we avoid a pain, when we avoid confrontation, when we avoid facing who we really are, we might as well be saying, "I am God."
The True Self
But this is not the way we are meant to live. It's not the way we were designed to answer the question, "Who are you?" Mulholland continues, he says this:
You are created to experience your true life, your genuine identity, your deepest meaning, your fullest purpose, your ultimate value, in an intimate, loving union with God at the core of your being.
Or, as we studied this past summer from Colossians 3: for you, your false self has died, and your life is now hidden in Christ with God.
So we are not to be self-referenced people, but God-oriented beings. It's not for nothing that we are told we are created in God's image. But for this to work, we have to know who God is and who isn't God. And what I want to encourage us with this morning is that Jesus is saying to us this Advent, "I am the Messiah, I am God" — so that we don't have to.
Running the universe? Not our job. Managing everyone's emotions? Not our job. Solving everyone's problems? Not our job. When we say or sing words like "Christ the Lord" or "newborn King" or "God in the flesh" or "Emmanuel," we must, by definition, be just as willing to admit, "I am not the Messiah, I am not King, I am not the Lord." As we like to say, God is God, and I am not.
Implications
So I want to give you just a few really practical implications of what this could mean for us this Christmas.
Number one: don't overbuy. Don't bury Santa. Gifts are a beautiful and meaningful thing, and they can be imbued with so much love. But when gift-buying and gift-giving becomes more about what I want people to think about me — including my family, my children — then the false self has taken over. And as an aside, and I know this may step on a toe or two, I really want to encourage you: don't go into debt this Christmas to buy gifts. If at all possible, avoid it. It can be such a strong desire to not want to disappoint a family member or a child, but it's just another way of wanting to control emotions, another way of controlling what people think of us. What your kids need more than a toy or a game system is a parent who's willing to be indifferent to their child's happiness so they can best take care of their household's healthiness. And that includes our finances.
Number two: present over perfect. This is a phrase of Shauna Nequest, and I think it's really powerful. Basically, a lot of us have this desire for things to be just right, and it becomes so easy to get caught up in the crazy that we actually forget to just sit down and enjoy being with the people we love. So instead of running around like crazy, trying to make our house and our parties and our every detail perfect, let's be willing to sit and be present with real, live people. Never sacrifice relationship for the sake of perfectionism. You'll never win.
And finally: let's be pointers, not fixers. Like Rachel shared earlier, we are to be the light. In John 1, John was able to say, "I am not the Messiah." But he was able to say, "I am testifying to the light. I'm not the light, but I came to testify to it." And so we would do well to remember those words this Christmas. We can't save people. We can't fix them, as much as we'd like to, perhaps, as we're sitting around that extended family table with that list of things we just want to fix about all the people around us. But we can't force that. What we can do is keep pointing people toward Jesus. We can allow God to be God and us not; allow God to transform us, to fix our eyes on him; and say to whoever we come across — family, friends, strangers — "Join with us as we look at Jesus." And, as 1 Corinthians 3 says, by looking at his glory, to be transformed by it.
So, we are not the Messiah. We are not God. And no one, including God, is asking you to be. And that's good news.
Closing Prayer
I want to invite the ushers to come forward, and the Jingle Jangle Brass Choir to make their way back to their seats, as we pray together and prepare for our offering. Let's pray.
Good and gracious God, we thank you that you are God and we are not — that you have not laid on us the burden of solving all the universe's problems, of fixing everyone we know. But God, what you have asked us to do is to submit to your will, to submit to your transforming presence in our lives, to be willing to say that our false self is gone, that we're not going to obey it anymore, God, that we're going to follow you. So Father, give us the grace that we need when we mess up, when we screw up royally, God. Would you give us and remind us of your compassion? Father, for these tithes and offerings, we pray your blessing on these as well. God, that hurt people would know your love through them, that hungry people would know your presence through them. And God, that your kingdom would be known and the good news would be shared. We pray all of these things in the name of Jesus, our Lord. Amen.
This is a transcript of the sermon as preached, lightly edited for readability.
