A Link to John 9 (ESV)

No Longer (9:1–7)

For centuries, Israel had lived with a painful proverb:

The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge (Jer 31:29; Ezek 18:2).

The idea ran deep. God himself had warned in the Torah:

I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me (Exod 20:5).

Suffering, in this framework, was traceable to sin, whether your own or your ancestors’.

Both Ezekiel and Jeremiah pushed back. Ezekiel declared that the soul who sins shall die, each person accountable before God alone (Ezek 18:4). Jeremiah, writing in what is the new covenant chapter of the Old Testament, announced that the day was coming when the proverb would be retired:

In those days they shall no longer say: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” But everyone shall die for his own iniquity (Jer 31:29–30).

The very next verses announce the new covenant (Jer 31:31–34). The question of who pays the penalty for sin and the promise of a new covenant stand side by side in Jeremiah’s vision.

That is the world the disciples inhabit when they encounter the man born blind. Their question is not foolish. It is the only question their theology allows:

“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2).

They want to know why.

Jesus refuses the premise entirely:

“It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:3).

He is not merely redirecting the conversation. He is enacting what Jeremiah promised. The age in which suffering is always read as divine retribution is giving way to something new. Jesus doesn’t look back to assign blame. He looks forward to what God is about to do.

He makes mud, anoints the man’s eyes, and sends him to wash in the pool of Siloam (John 9:6–7). The man goes, washes, and comes back seeing.

When the Pharisees press the healed man to renounce Jesus, he won’t be moved:

“Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see” (John 9:25).

He makes no theological argument. He doesn’t appeal to Scripture to explain who Jesus is. He just gives the testimony of a changed life, and it is more convincing than anything the Pharisees can muster. Changed lives change hearts.

Jesus never answered the disciples’ question. He replaced it with a better one. Not “why is this man suffering?” but “what will God do here?” And then he showed them.

As Christ’s disciples, we need to start seeing the world the way Jesus did rather than through our theological systems. Everywhere there is pain, there is potential for the works of God to be displayed. When God’s people work to bring God’s healing, justice, and mercy into the world, that witness to Jesus is more persuasive than any theological or rational argument we could ever construct.

For Judgment (9:35–41)

John 9 focuses on the healing of a man born blind and the consequences of that miracle. In the Gospels, while these are literal miracles, the acts of restoring sight to the blind are almost always also metaphors and signs. Verse 39 highlights this when Jesus says, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.”

Jesus clearly isn’t speaking about literal blindness here. Instead, he uses the language of blindness and sight metaphorically to describe the great reversal that his ministry will bring to the world. Those who believe they see the truth will become blind, while those considered blind by the world to God’s truth will see.

When questioned by the Pharisees (who claimed to see), the man born blind said, “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see” (9:25). He didn’t understand everything about who Jesus was and is. Neither do I, and neither do you. But what he did know was how Jesus had changed his life, and that was enough for him. Focus today on how Jesus changed your life, and then, like the man born blind, worship him.

A Link to John 8

Before Abraham Was (8:48–59)

When Moses asks the name of the God who speaks from the burning bush, the answer comes back in the first person: “I AM WHO I AM” (Exod 3:14). The Greek translation renders this ἐγώ εἰμί ὁ ὤν, the self-existent one whose being depends on nothing outside himself. Centuries later, Isaiah records Yahweh returning to that same name in a courtroom scene in which the nations are summoned to produce witnesses for their gods. Yahweh’s own testimony is decisive:

“You are my witnesses,” declares the Lord, “and my servant whom I have chosen, that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me" (Isa 43:10).

The Hebrew אֲנִי הוּא, rendered in the Septuagint as ἐγώ εἰμι, marks Yahweh’s absolute uniqueness across Deutero-Isaiah (41:4; 43:25; 46:4; 48:12). From Sinai to the exile, the name belongs to Yahweh alone. No creature shares it.

Then Jesus claims that name.

The exchange leading to v. 58 has the character of a hostile interrogation. Jesus’s opponents open with a double insult:

“Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?” (8:48).

Jesus does not defend his honor. He defers it entirely to the Father (8:50) and advances a claim his opponents find more dangerous than any slur: that keeping his word delivers a person from death (8:51). When they protest that Abraham himself died, Jesus does not yield. He names Abraham as a witness: “Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad” (8:56). John does not specify where Abraham saw it. However, Second Temple traditions associated the patriarch with prophetic sight of future redemption. What matters is that Abraham saw and rejoiced, while Jesus’s opponents see and rage.

The crowd hears a man not yet fifty claiming acquaintance with a patriarch dead for centuries, and they press him: “You have seen Abraham?” (8:57). The answer is the climax of the chapter and of the entire interrogation:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, ἐγώ εἰμι” (8:58).

The words ἐγώ εἰμι are not a grammatical accident. They are the name from the burning bush and the name from the Isaianic courtroom, spoken now by Jesus without qualification or apology. He does not claim merely to predate Abraham. He claims the mode of existence that belongs to Yahweh alone, the uncreated, self-existent being before whom no other god stands.

The crowd understands perfectly. They pick up stones (8:59). In moving to execute him for blasphemy, they become the most honest witnesses in the chapter. The name that Yahweh spoke from Sinai and that Isaiah said belonged to no creature has been claimed by the carpenter from Nazareth.

January 9, 2026

You might notice (or have noticed yesterday) the double brackets around John 7:53–8:11, along with a note indicating that the earliest manuscripts do not include this well-known passage. This is true, and it has led some to argue that the story of the woman caught in adultery should be removed from our Bibles and not preached on because it was likely not part of the original composition of John.

But consider this: many of the early church fathers were aware of this story and cited it authoritatively, and someone in the early church was so convinced that it was an authentic account from the life of Jesus that they felt compelled to include it in John’s Gospel (as well as Luke’s, actually; some even argue it fits more appropriately in Luke).

The question here concerns authority. Are the sayings and actions of Jesus authoritative because they are in the Bible (meaning the original writings of the books), or because Jesus said and did them?

The story of the woman caught in adultery is likely not original to John but is nevertheless still an authentic Jesus tradition. Should we cut this remarkable story of forgiveness from our Bibles, or give thanks for the mercy that Jesus showed the woman and model that same mercy in the world?

Introduction

As I was preparing for the homiletical challenge that is Holy Week, a couple of themes kept standing out to me—both in the Passion narrative and in the resurrection appearances—as things I wanted to address and connect the dots on, but the sermons I was preaching didn’t seem like the right place for them. So I want to do some of that here.

The first is a theme that runs throughout every resurrection appearance in every Gospel: doubt. It isn’t just Thomas who doubts. We’ll look at this in some detail, but what struck me is how remarkable some of these moments of doubt actually are. In one account, Jesus is physically standing before his disciples, yet the text still says that some doubted.

I think the doubt creeps in and surprises us, maybe a little bit, because we don’t really feel the full weight of Good Friday, especially from the perspective of Jesus’s first disciples. We feel the weight of Good Friday retrospectively. We are thankful for our Savior and horrified by what he suffered on our behalf. So we do feel that weight, but we’re looking backward.

Try imagining being in that moment. Try imagining being one of Jesus’ first disciples. You’ve followed Jesus for years and left everything to do so. You hope, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, that he will “be the one to redeem Israel.” You know the Isaianic promises. You know the Danielic timetable. You’ve heard him say that the time is fulfilled, that the kingdom of God is at hand. You’ve seen him perform healing miracles. You’ve seen him perform feeding miracles. You’ve seen him have power over the wind and the waves. You’ve even seen him raise the dead. And then … the Roman Empire did what empires do. They killed him. And with his death, all your hopes and dreams came to a sudden, catastrophic end.

Failed Messiahs

What should have happened after Jesus died is that every one of his disciples should have just dispersed and gone their own way. We know this because when Jesus died on Good Friday, it wasn’t the first or last time a messianic claimant had succumbed to the power of Rome. Simon of Peraea proclaimed himself king after the death of Herod and was hunted down and beheaded by Roman forces around 4 BC. Theudas led his followers to the Jordan River, promising to part it like a new Joshua, and the procurator Fadus had him beheaded around 44 AD.

In 56 AD, a figure known only as the Egyptian led thousands to the Mount of Olives, promising the walls of Jerusalem would fall at his command; Roman forces killed or scattered his followers, and he vanished. In 70 AD, Simon bar Giora led the Jewish revolt against Rome. When Jerusalem fell, he was marched through the streets of Rome and publicly executed as the capstone of Titus’s triumphal procession. And sixty-five years later, at the effective end of Second Temple Judaism, Bar Kokhba, hailed as the Messiah by Rabbi Akiva himself, died fighting Rome at the Battle of Betar in 135 AD.

In all these cases, the pattern is consistent and without exception. When the leader died, the movement ended. His followers dispersed. Nobody went home and claimed the dead leader had risen from the grave. Nobody continued to proclaim that the leader was alive and reigning at the right hand of God. That idea — that a would-be Messiah executed by Rome had risen bodily from the dead in the middle of history — would have been absurd to anyone in the first century. Even if you were a Jew who believed in resurrection, that was a corporate event that would occur at the end of the age for all the faithful. The idea of individual, bodily resurrection in the middle of history was unthinkable, or maybe better, unbelievable. When Jesus died, what his disciples must have thought was: it’s over. We put our hope in him. We thought he was the one, and now it’s over.

The Doubting Disciples

This historical context makes clear why, despite Jesus’ clear claim that he would die and rise again on the third day, his disciples appear to have doubted the claims of others that he had in fact risen from the dead. In John 20, we have the famous “Doubting Thomas” episode that everyone knows. But Thomas isn’t unique in his doubt. This theme runs throughout the post-Easter scenes.

When the women returned from the empty tomb and reported what they had seen, Luke tells us that the disciples considered their testimony “an idle tale, and they did not believe them” (Luke 24:11 ESV). On the road to Emmaus, two disciples discuss the reports of resurrection with the risen Jesus himself walking beside them, and they remain unconvinced — and so Jesus calls them foolish and slow of heart to believe. When Jesus appears to the disciples in Luke 24, they think he is a ghost. He has to show them his hands and feet and ask for something to eat, and Luke says they still “disbelieved for joy” (Luke 24:41) — a remarkable phrase that suggests the news was too good, too impossible, to process.

Matthew describes a resurrection appearance in Galilee in which Jesus is physically present before the eleven, and the text plainly states that “some doubted” (Matt 28:17). Matthew is not saying that some had doubted beforehand and that, now, that doubt has disappeared. He is saying that, right there in that moment, even while Jesus is physically standing in their presence, some still doubted. Even Mary Magdalene, the first to witness the empty tomb, assumes the body has been stolen and initially mistakes the risen Jesus for a gardener until he speaks her name.

The doubt runs through every account, in every Gospel, among every category of witness. Thomas’s doubt is not the exception; it’s part of the pattern.

The Claim No One Expected

I say all of this so that we can be unambiguous about what Jesus’s first disciples claimed about the resurrection. From a historical perspective, Jesus’ death was not unique. Jesus was just one of several messianic upstarts that Rome dealt with the way that Rome does. But where Jesus is absolutely historically unique is in the claims that his doubting disciples made about what happened after he died. They didn’t say that Jesus had been raised spiritually to the right hand of God. They didn’t say that he lived on in their hearts. They didn’t say that they were going to keep him alive by furthering the movement he had started. If any of that had been what the early Christians wanted to say, there was no reason for doubt. The doubt only arises when they make the impossible claim that the one who died is bodily, physically alive again.

They claimed, unlike any of the followers of the other would-be messiahs put to death by Rome, that Jesus was alive bodily. Look at what Peter says in Acts 2. His argument is stunning:

“Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know — this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it” (Acts 2:22–24).

And then, as if he wants to drive the point home, Peter quotes Psalm 16, where David says, “You will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your Holy One see corruption.”

Then Peter says:

“Brothers, I may say to you with confidence about the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day” (Acts 2:29).

That’s the claim. David’s tomb is still occupied. Jesus’s tomb is empty because God raised him from the dead. The claim was so outrageous that even the disciples didn’t believe it at first, even though Jesus had told them plainly what would happen. When he tried to communicate it to them, they rebuked him. They tried to figure out what he really meant by saying he would die and rise again on the third day. Even when he told them plainly, they didn’t have the mental categories to understand what he was telling them. And frankly, I don’t think we have the mental categories today to understand this incredible event fully.

The Posture of Faith

All of this means there is room for doubt in the Christian life. The claim we make about Jesus is historically incredible. It is, by any ordinary measure, the most unbelievable thing anyone has ever asserted about something that happened in human history. And we believe it not because we have seen it with our own eyes but because we trust the testimony of those who did. That’s faith.

The disciples didn’t believe it until they saw him. Thomas didn’t believe it until Jesus stood before him and invited him to place his fingers in the wounds. Thomas said, “I will never believe.” Notice what Jesus does not do. He does not rebuke Thomas. He does not shame him for his doubt. He returns specifically for Thomas, stands before him, and gives him exactly what he needs to move from unbelief to belief. And what Thomas does in that moment is fall to his knees and make the greatest Christological confession in John’s Gospel: “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28). The man we remember for his doubt is the first person in John’s Gospel to say out loud what John has been arguing from the very first verse.

And then Jesus says something truly remarkable, something that reaches straight past Thomas to every generation that has ever come after him:

“Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29).

That is us. On this side of the Second Coming, we will never see Jesus the way Thomas saw him. We were not there in that room. We will never touch the wounds.

We believe because the apostles testified, because the Church has carried that testimony across two thousand years, and because, by the grace of God, that testimony has found us here, in this room, on this Sunday. That belief is not a lesser form of faith. Jesus calls it blessed.

Peter understood this. That first chapter of his first epistle is extraordinary, and I regret that it doesn’t come around in the lectionary more often. Peter is writing to communities who have never seen Jesus bodily, who are suffering for their faith, who have every reason to abandon the claim as too costly and too incredible. He doesn’t tell them to try harder or to stop doubting. He marvels at what he sees in them:

“Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory” (1 Pet 1:8).

To love someone you have never seen. To trust a testimony about the most unbelievable event in human history. To keep believing in the face of suffering and doubt and the ordinary grinding difficulty of everyday life. Peter treats that not as the bare minimum of Christian faith but as something extraordinary, something commendable, something to be awed at.

So if you are here today carrying doubt, if you are feeling the weight of the world and wondering whether any of this is really true, you are in good company. The disciples doubted. Thomas doubted. The claim is genuinely incredible, and faith in it is not always easy or settled.

And it’s no good pretending that it is.

What matters is that you are here. What matters is that you have not walked away from the testimony. The disciples who doubted were the same disciples who eventually fell to their knees before the risen Christ. Doubt is not the end of the story. For Thomas, it was the beginning of the deepest, truest confession he ever made.

To believe this outrageous, historically incredible claim without having seen him, to love him without having seen him, to gather and worship him without having seen him — is not a deficiency. It is not second-rate faith. It is not a consolation prize for people who came into the world just a bit too late.

It is faith that comes as a gift from the God who raised Jesus from the dead and poured his Spirit into us. And that faith, Jesus says, is not in vain.

Jesus calls it blessed.

Amen.

Life Group Discussion Guide

Intro Prayer

Lord Jesus, we come to you with our questions and our doubts, our settled convictions and our uncertainties. Thank you for not shaming Thomas for his doubt, but for coming back specifically for him. As we open your word together, give us the honesty to wrestle with what we actually believe and why, and the faith to trust the testimony of those who saw you face to face. Amen.

Ice Breaker

Has there been a moment when something you were told turned out to be far more extraordinary than you had imagined? What was it like to realize the full weight of it?

Questions

1. Fr. Michael argues that the doubt in the resurrection accounts is not incidental but structural: it runs through every Gospel, among every category of witness. Why does that matter? What would we lose if the disciples had believed immediately and without question?

2. The disciples had heard Jesus say plainly that he would die and rise on the third day. And yet they still doubted. What does that tell us about the nature of the claim he was making, and about the limits of our mental categories for understanding it?

3. Luke says the disciples “disbelieved for joy.” What does that phrase open up? Have you ever found yourself unable to receive something because it was too good to process?

4. The historical pattern is consistent: when the messianic leader died, the movement collapsed. No one went home and claimed the dead leader had risen bodily. What does it tell us that the disciples, who had every cultural and historical reason to give up, made exactly that claim, even though they initially didn’t believe it themselves?

5. Peter’s argument in Acts 2 turns on a single contrast: David’s tomb is occupied, Jesus’s tomb is empty. How does that contrast function as an argument? Why does the bodily resurrection matter? Why wouldn’t a spiritual resurrection have been enough?

6. Thomas said, “I will never believe,” and Jesus came back specifically for him. Jesus does not rebuke him or shame him. What does that tell us about how Jesus handles doubt? What does it tell us about what Jesus wants from Thomas, and from us?

7. Jesus says those who believe without seeing are blessed. Peter, writing to people who have never seen Jesus, seems to marvel that they love him anyway. Do you experience your faith as something extraordinary, or has it become ordinary? What would it take to feel the weight of what it means to trust a two-thousand-year-old testimony?

8. Fr. Michael ends by saying that faith is not something we generate but something we receive as a gift. What difference does that make for how we relate to our own doubts and struggles?

Life Application

Identify one area of genuine doubt or uncertainty in your faith and bring it into the open this week, in prayer, in a conversation with someone you trust, or in a journal. The disciples who doubted were the same disciples who fell to their knees before the risen Christ. Doubt is not the end of the story. Treat it as the beginning of a question worth asking honestly.

Key Takeaways

• Doubt in the resurrection appearances is not the exception. It runs through every account, in every Gospel, among every category of witness.

• The claim the disciples made, bodily resurrection in the middle of history, had no precedent and no category. Even they didn’t believe it at first.

• The historical pattern of failed messianic movements makes the disciples’ testimony more credible, not less. They had every reason to go home. They didn’t.

• Jesus does not shame Thomas for his doubt. He comes back specifically for him and gives him exactly what he needs.

• Believing without seeing is not second-rate faith. Jesus calls it blessed. Peter treats it as something extraordinary.

• Faith is not something we produce. It is a gift from the God who raised Jesus from the dead and poured his Spirit into us.

Ending Prayer

Lord Jesus, you are the one who came back for Thomas. You are the one Peter’s communities loved without having seen. You are the one this testimony has been carrying across two thousand years, and by your grace, it has found us here. We confess that we have not seen you, that faith is not always easy or settled, and that we do not always know what to do with our doubts. Meet us in them. Give us what we cannot produce on our own. And let the faith you give us be the beginning of the deepest confession we have ever made. Amen.

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A Link to John 7 (ESV)

The Origin They Missed (7:25–31)

Israel’s hope for a Messiah took on a particular form. By the Second Temple period, many Jews believed that when the Messiah finally arrived, his origins would be concealed, and his true identity would remain hidden until the moment he suddenly appeared and was revealed. It was this hiddenness that would define him—no one would see him coming.

This expectation appears in several texts from that period: the figure rising from the sea in 4 Ezra is hidden and unknown until his revelation (4 Ezra 13:51–52), the Son of Man in 1 Enoch is described as chosen and concealed from God before creation (1 En. 48:6), and Justin Martyr’s second-century dialogue with Trypho preserves the tradition that the Messiah remains unknown even to himself until Elijah comes to reveal him (Justin Martyr, Dial. 8.4).

The Jerusalem crowd in John 7 is aware of this tradition, and they use it to settle the question of Jesus once and for all.

“But we know where this man comes from, and when the Christ appears, no one will know where he comes from” (John 7:27).

The logic appears sound. They believe Jesus is from Galilee, yet the Messiah’s origins are meant to be unknown. So, Jesus cannot be the Messiah. Case closed.

John, however, is doing something precise here. The crowd is correct that the Messiah’s origins would be concealed from them. They are simply mistaken about which origins are important. Jesus responds with sharp irony:

“You know me, and you know where I am from. But I have not come of my own accord. He who sent me is true, and him you do not know. I know him, for I come from him, and he sent me” (John 7:28–29).

The geographic location, Galilee, isn’t the main point. The important origin is the Father, who is completely hidden from them. They dismiss Jesus based on a tradition that, applied correctly, would have identified him. The crowd reaches for the right criterion and misses the right answer.

This pattern runs throughout John’s Gospel. Characters often speak more truth than they realize. Caiaphas later states it is more convenient for one man to die for the people, meaning something much smaller than what John records (John 11:49–52). Pilate asks, “What is truth?” while standing in front of it (John 18:38). The Jerusalem crowd references the hidden Messiah and describes him perfectly without actually recognizing him.

Jesus’s true origin is not a village in Galilee. It is the Father who sent him. And because they do not know the Father, they cannot recognize the Son. The hiddenness they expected was always theological, not geographical. The Messiah came from exactly where no one was looking.

The Water that Waits (7:37–39)

Israel had not forgotten the rock. In the wilderness, when the people were dying of thirst, God told Moses to strike it, and water poured out to sustain the whole congregation (Exod 17:6). The memory of that moment shaped the Feast of Booths, which commemorated God’s provision during the wilderness years. Each morning of the feast, priests drew water and carried it in procession to the temple, enacting Israel’s hope that God would provide once again.

But the prophets had promised something greater than water from a rock. Zechariah had envisioned a day when living waters would flow from Jerusalem itself (Zech 14:8). Isaiah had made an explicit connection between water poured on the land and the Spirit poured on God’s people: “I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour my Spirit upon your offspring” (Isa 44:3). The wilderness provision pointed forward to a final, eschatological outpouring.

On the final and most important day of the Feast of Booths, Jesus stands and proclaims boldly, using language unique to John’s Gospel:

“If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water’” (John 7:37–38).

Jesus appears to quote the Old Testament, although his exact words aren’t found in any single passage. He is summarizing a broad stream of prophetic hope, from the water at the rock to Zechariah’s vision of living water flowing from the eschatological Jerusalem. He has already described himself as the bread of life (John 6); now he portrays himself as the source of living water. He is both the typological fulfillment of what God did in the wilderness and the direct fulfillment of what the prophets envisioned.

John then provides the interpretive key: “Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified” (John 7:39). Glorification here means resurrection and ascension. The living water cannot flow until Jesus has passed through death, been raised, and seated at the Father’s right hand. When that moment arrives, the Spirit falls on Jerusalem, the followers of Jesus are filled, and the eschatological outpouring the prophets foretold finally occurs (Acts 2).

Jesus embodies Israel’s entire story and brings it to its climax. The water from the rock always pointed here. Give thanks today for the Holy Spirit. His presence in you is living water, cleansing, refreshing, and renewing.

A Link to John 6

The Bread That Manna Could Never Be (6:37–51)

For forty years in the wilderness, God provided Israel with manna. Every morning, it appeared on the ground, and each day, the people gathered what they needed (Exod 16:14–18). It was miraculous. It was merciful. Yet, manna was always temporary. The bread itself was never the goal; it was a sign pointing beyond itself.

Jesus makes the provisionality of manna explicit in a discourse found only in John’s Gospel (6:22–59). In 6:49–50, he says:

“Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.”

The contrast is stark. Even manna, God’s own supernatural gift, was food that perishes. Those who ate it still died. The living bread is set apart by one thing manna could never provide: life that never ends.

The crowd, however, cannot see this. They γογγύζω, they grumble (6:41), and the word is the same one that trails Israel through the wilderness in the LXX (Exod 16:2; Num 14:2; Ps 78:18–20). A people who cannot receive what God offers will always find reasons to grumble at what he provides.

But Jesus does not respond to their grumbling with another reference to manna. Instead, he references the Prophets: “And they will all be taught by God” (6:45; Isa 54:13). This citation carries new-covenant significance (Jer 31:33–34). The wilderness generation’s failure was not just a failure of nerve; it was a failure of the heart. The New Exodus calls for more than just new provision. It demands a people drawn and taught by the Father himself.

What the Father draws them toward is indicated by a refrain that echoes four times throughout the discourse: “I will raise him up on the last day” (6:39, 40, 44, 54). The new Promised Land of the New Exodus is not Canaan; it is resurrection. Manna sustained Israel on a journey to a land where they would still face death. The living bread sustains toward a destination that death cannot claim.

Manna was always a sign. The living bread is what that sign was always pointing toward, and those who eat it will not merely survive the wilderness. They will be raised.

January 7, 2026

We’re back to reading sequentially through John, so today’s reading is John 6. Remember, as you read the feeding of the five thousand and hear Jesus say, “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day” (6:54), that the church was already celebrating communion for decades by the time John writes his Gospel. It would have been impossible for John’s Christian readers to hear Jesus’ words in any context other than an explicitly eucharistic one.

A Link to John 5 (ESV)

How Many Years? (5:1–9)

It’s the theology, not the devil, that’s in the details.

Israel’s story is, at many of its crucial turns, a story of waiting. From Egypt to Canaan, from exile to return, the people of God find themselves repeatedly suspended between promise and fulfillment, unable to cross into what God has prepared. John places Jesus in the midst of that long story when he brings him to the Pool of Bethesda, where a man has lain, unable to move, for 38 years (John 5:5).

The number is not incidental. Deuteronomy 2:14 states that Israel spent 38 years in a weakened state between Kadesh-barnea and the brook Zered, the period of divine judgment after the spies’ failure, when the generation that left Egypt died and Israel could not advance. The total wilderness sojourn rounded to forty, a number so familiar it has become shorthand for the whole. However, thirty-eight years was the precise period of stagnation. John’s detail is intentional: the man at Bethesda isn’t just a sick person; he symbolizes Israel, waiting at the waters, unable to cross into God’s rest in the Promised Land.

The Pool of Bethesda, found only in John’s Gospel, was surrounded by five porticoes filled with the blind, the lame, and the paralyzed (John 5:2–3). Into that scene of accumulated suffering comes Jesus. He approaches one man and asks a question that can sound almost cruel: “Do you want to be healed?” (John 5:6). The question probes something deeper than physical desire. The man’s answer reveals his disorientation; he explains only why healing has been impossible, cataloging his lack of help (John 5:7). He does not answer the question. He cannot yet see the one standing before him clearly enough to ask.

Jesus does not wait for a better answer. He commands, and the man is healed immediately, picks up his mat, and walks (John 5:8–9).

John notes, almost as an aside, that the day was a Sabbath (John 5:9). The detail will ignite the controversy ahead, but it carries its own weight here. The Sabbath was Israel’s sign of covenant rest, the day that pointed toward the completed work of God (Gen 2:2–3). That Jesus heals on the Sabbath is not a violation of it but a fulfillment of what it always signified. The thirty-eight-year wait is over. What the law could not accomplish, Jesus does in a word.

The Sabbath and National Identity (5:10–17)

John 5 begins with Jesus healing a man at the pool on the Sabbath. The Jews tell the man who had been healed that it was not lawful for him to carry his bed on the Sabbath. Likewise, John states that they were persecuting Jesus “because he was doing these things on the Sabbath” (5:16).

It seems unbelievable to us that anyone could be angered by a miraculous healing simply because it happened on the Sabbath, but we need to keep two historical points in mind. First, the people went into exile because they broke God’s commandments, including the Sabbath laws. In fact, the exile punishment is directly linked to the Sabbath in Lev 26:34-35. Second, just a few hundred years earlier, practices that were clearly Jewish—such as food laws, circumcision, and Sabbath observance—had been explicitly banned by the Greeks in an effort to erase Jewish identity. As a result, these practices became a key part of Jewish national and religious identity.

So the Jewish concern with Sabbath keeping isn’t just about “Hey, you’re not supposed to be doing that on this day.” It’s deeper than that. Breaking the Sabbath law not only caused exile but also represented a break from national and religious identity. There’s much more at stake with the Sabbath than just following or breaking a commandment, which is why the Jewish people in Jesus’ day reacted so strongly.

A Link to John 4 (ESV)

Living Water (4:7–15)

The prophets had dared to hope that God’s presence would return. When the glory of the Lord departed the Jerusalem temple in Ezekiel 10–11, it was one of the most devastating moments in Israel’s history. But Ezekiel saw a future when a new temple would rise, and from its threshold, living water would flow outward, making everything flourish wherever it reached (Ezek 47:1–12). Zechariah shared this hope: “On that day living waters shall flow out from Jerusalem” (Zech 14:8). God’s return would bring nothing less than living water flowing from the new temple to renew creation.

It is into this stream of expectation that Jesus steps beside a well in Samaria and says something remarkable.

Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (John 4:10).

The woman hears a practical claim about water, but Jesus speaks about something much larger. John’s prologue had already set the foundation: “the Word became flesh and ἐσκήνωσεν [tabernacled] among us, and we have seen his glory” (John 1:14). The tabernacling of God’s glory among his people, marked by filling of the tabernacle (Exod 40:34–35) and the dedication of Solomon’s temple (1 Kgs 8:10–11), has been fulfilled again in the person of Jesus. He is the new temple, the place where heaven and earth meet. And from this new temple, living water flows.

“Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:13–14).

This exchange appears only in John’s Gospel. Its significance grows later in the Gospel, when Jesus proclaims at the Feast of Tabernacles, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink” (John 7:37), and John clarifies: the living water is the Spirit (7:39). The water Jesus offers the Samaritan woman at this ordinary well is the Holy Spirit, the very presence of God that once filled the tabernacle and the temple, now flowing freely from Jesus and filling his disciples.

The woman went to draw water and met the one from whom the prophets said living water would someday flow. What Ezekiel and Zechariah envisioned as the great renewal of all things, Jesus offers in a quiet conversation beside a well in Samaria.

Forsaken (4:16–18)

It’s common to read John 4 and view the Samaritan woman negatively. She’s drawing water at an unusual time, which some interpret as an indication that she’s an outcast, and she’s had five husbands and is now with a man who isn’t her husband.

However, we must remember that men held all the power in her context. Having a husband was how women stayed out of poverty, and a woman couldn’t divorce her husband under biblical law. So, if she’s had five husbands, she’s either been bereaved or abandoned five times by presumably different men, and quite likely for her own protection, she is now forced to live with a man who is not her husband.

Maybe she’s not the sexually promiscuous woman most readers assume she is, but rather someone who has been abandoned and forsaken multiple times and has been forced to make a difficult choice for her own protection. We don’t have enough information to make a definitive judgment. Still, it’s always valuable to slow down and read familiar texts from different angles to see if any new insights emerge.

This sermon is from our first-ever bilingual service. Fr. Luis Diaz had a translated copy and would read that copy after each paragraph. The video above is from the English-only Easter service. The video at the end of the sermon is from the bilingual service.

Introduction

With the resurrection of Jesus Christ, a new world has begun. Let’s be clear. That is the claim the New Testament makes about the first Easter Sunday.

The importance of Easter isn’t just that someone who had died came back to life. If that were the case, there are other stories in the Bible about people who died and then lived again, like Lazarus, who could be celebrated today. Jesus’ resurrection is not the only story in the Bible where someone who died comes back to life. But Jesus’s resurrection is different. When Jesus rose from the dead, something new happened. On that first Easter, the world changed in ways nobody could have predicted.

There are at least two ways to talk about that new world that burst forth from the empty tomb on Easter morning. First, we could speak of this age (the age in which we all live) and the age to come. With Easter, God’s future (the age to come) has come bursting into our present age. Second, we could discuss the first creation and the new creation. That’s the direction that our Gospel reading points us toward this morning.

The New Creation and Its Gardener

The words “new creation” aren’t in the text itself, but the concept is everywhere. Parts of the story of Genesis 1 are being retold in fresh and surprising ways because God is, starting on that first Easter morning, creating a new world.

Notice, for example, that the resurrection takes place “On the first day of the week.”

Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb (John 20:1, ESV).

What was the state of the world at the start of the first day of creation? Genesis 1:2 states that the earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.

When Mary Magdalene arrives at the tomb on the first day of the week, the world is “still dark.” Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, the light of the world shines again, but neither Mary nor Peter nor John can see it yet.

Mary thinks someone has taken the body. Peter and John notice the linen cloths lying there, but:

as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead (John 20:9).

The disciples leave for their homes. Mary stays in the darkness, and she weeps there. That sorrow is where Jesus meets her.

But at first, she still doesn’t recognize him. And John then notes what appears to be a strange detail.

Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away” (John 20:15).

A gardener? John has already mentioned not only that Jesus was arrested in a garden (18:1), but also that he was buried in one (19:41).

Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb in which no one had yet been laid (John 19:41).

Let that sink in. The resurrection of Jesus Christ occurred in a garden on the first day of the week, while the world was still in darkness, and in that context, Jesus is mistaken for a gardener.

Who was the one, way back in Genesis, commanded to care for the Garden of Eden? In other words, who was Eden’s gardener?

Adam.

Adam was commanded to tend and work in the garden, but he failed in his vocation. He lost everything. Mary stands in a garden on the first day of a new week of a new creation, looking at the last Adam, and she assumes he is the gardener. She is more correct than she realizes.

John does not rush to correct this misunderstanding because, at the story’s deeper level, it’s not really a mistake. The risen Christ has come as the true caretaker of God’s new creation, as the one who will restore and care for what Adam lost.

And just like in Genesis, God speaks again, not saying “Let there be light,” but simply calling her name, “Mary.” And immediately she recognized Jesus, and then she went and told the disciples, “I have seen the Lord.”

The Gardener’s Voice

In Simply Christian, N. T. Wright writes about “echoes of a voice,” universal human longings that haunt us and point beyond ourselves, like hearing a voice just around the corner that you can’t quite find or finding a broken signpost pointing out into the mist. For all of Holy Week, I’ve been talking about these signposts.

Wright’s point is that all human beings possess a longing that we can’t quite name. We sense that love ought to win, even though hate so often flourishes. We sense that beauty means something, even if we struggle to define it, and even if it ultimately fades. We sense that we were made for community, even though we so often fracture our relationships. We sense that justice should prevail, even though it is so often denied to those who need it most.

These longings come to us like an echo of a voice we have never heard directly, like broken signposts pointing into a mist our eyes cannot quite penetrate.

But what happens when, on Easter morning, the Second Adam walks out of the mist? What occurs when our risen Lord emerges from the darkness of death, comes from around the corner, surprises us, and calls us by name?

In that moment, the echoes give way to the one whose voice we have finally heard, and the broken signposts give way to the one to whom they had always been pointing. In that moment, we meet the one for whom our hearts have always longed. We recognize him, and like Mary, we go and tell others.

That is Easter: not merely a doctrine to believe, but the living truth behind every longing for community, every ache for justice, every act of selfless love, and every moment of beauty that has ever made you wonder if there is more to the world than it seems. That voice belongs to one man. He was dead, but now he is alive forever, and he is calling you by name.

Sent by the Gardener

Mary recognizes the voice speaking to her, and then Jesus sends her.

“Go to my brothers,” he says (John 20:17). She goes and delivers the first Easter sermon ever preached. It is short, direct, and gets right to the point:

Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord” (John 20:18).

The resurrection sends us out. Easter is not just for standing at the empty tomb and celebrating. As those whom our risen Lord has called by name and as those who have heard his risen voice, we are sent back into a world still listening to echoes and staring at signposts and wondering what they might mean. That “sending out” is our vocation.

Our mission is not to prove our intellectual superiority with clever arguments, nor to condemn the world with our self-righteousness. Rather, we are called to live in such a way that, by our words and deeds, the echoes grow louder and louder until the people around us begin to suspect the voice is real and realize that Jesus is calling them by name, too.

The tomb is empty. The new creation has begun. The gardener is alive, and he is calling you by name.

Go and tell the whole world.

Amen.

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Below is a discussion guide for small groups or Sunday school classes based on this week’s Easter sermon, “The Gardener’s Voice.” The questions are designed to start with the text and then explore broader ideas—what John is doing in the story, what it means that Jesus calls us by name, and what it looks like to be sent out like Mary was. If you find it helpful, feel free to share it. It’s available for anyone who wants to use it.

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Life Group Discussion Guide

Opening Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ, you called Mary by name in the garden, and she recognized you. Quiet us now so that we might hear your voice as we open your Word together. Give us ears to understand what the text is doing and the courage to be sent by what we find. Amen.

Ice Breaker

Is there a moment in your life when something you had long hoped for or sensed was true finally became clear? What was that like?

Discussion Questions

1. The sermon argues that the resurrection is the beginning of a new creation, not just a resuscitation. What details in John 20 point toward that claim? What would be lost if we read it as only the latter?

2. John does not correct Mary’s assumption that Jesus is the gardener because, at the story’s deeper level, it is not a mistake. What does it mean that Jesus is the true gardener, the last Adam? What did Adam lose that Jesus has come to restore?

3. N. T. Wright describes universal human longings for love, beauty, justice, and community as “echoes of a voice” and broken signposts pointing into a mist. Do you find that description accurate to your own experience? Which of those longings do you feel most acutely?

4. The sermon says that when the risen Christ calls us by name, the echoes give way to the voice itself, and the signposts give way to the one to whom they had always been pointing. What does it mean for those longings to be fulfilled rather than explained?

5. Mary’s first Easter sermon is brief: “I have seen the Lord.” Why is personal testimony, rather than argument, the form that Easter proclamation takes?

6. The sermon distinguishes between proving intellectual superiority and living in such a way that the echoes grow louder for the people around us. What does the second posture actually look like in practice?

7. Easter is described as a sending, not merely a celebration. How does that shift the way you think about what you do with the rest of the week?

Life Application

Identify one person in your life who seems to be listening to echoes, someone who senses that love should win, that beauty means something, that justice matters, but who has not yet heard whose voice is behind those longings. Pray for them by name this week, and ask God for one concrete opportunity, in word or deed, to make the echo a little louder.

Closing Prayer

Risen Lord, you called Mary by name and sent her to tell the world. You call us by name and send us the same way. Give us the courage to go. Make us the kind of people in whose words and lives the echoes grow louder, until the people around us begin to suspect the voice is real. The tomb is empty. The new creation has begun. Send us out to say so. Amen.

A Link to John 3 (ESV)

The Lifted Serpent (3:14–21)

Long before Jesus spoke to Nicodemus in the shadows of a Jerusalem night, Israel had already learned what it meant to look to an unlikely source of salvation. In the wilderness, God’s people complained against Moses and against God, and the Lord sent fiery serpents among them (Num 21:5–6). Many died. When the people cried out, God did not remove the serpents. Instead, he provided a remedy that matched the wound: a bronze serpent lifted on a pole, so that anyone who looked at it would live (21:8–9). This strange, counterintuitive act of deliverance is what Jesus references when he explains to Nicodemus what must happen to the Son of Man.

The comparison is startling. One might expect Jesus to compare himself to Moses, the deliverer. Instead, he compares himself to the serpent:

And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life (John 3:14–15).

This image is unique to John’s Gospel and is meant to unsettle us. The serpent was the problem. The serpent in the garden introduced the venom of sin and death into the human story (Gen 3:1–19). Yet Jesus says that when he is lifted up on the cross, he will take the serpent’s place. Paul expresses the same idea: God made the sinless one to become sin for humanity, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor 5:21). The curse does not simply disappear; it goes to the cross.

Only in this light does the meaning of the most familiar verse in all of Scripture become clear.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16).

The “for” at the beginning of the verse points backward. John 3:16 is not a standalone promise. It explains a substitution: the Son will be lifted up in place of the serpent, taking the venom of sin out of the world and into himself. To crush the serpent’s head, he will take the serpent’s place.

To believe, then, is to look. It is to fix one’s gaze on the one who was lifted up in the serpent’s place and to discover there, not condemnation, but life.

January 3, 2026

John 3:16 is arguably the most famous verse in the Bible, but the entire paragraph is fascinating. These words especially stand out to me: “This is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil” (v. 19).

The light of Christ has come into the world. But light exposes. It reveals. Some people prefer darkness. Some people prefer to keep themselves (or maybe parts of themselves) hidden from the revealing light of Christ. This is judgment: to see the light, but prefer the darkness more. May we who have been born again of the Spirit never prefer darkness to light.

A Link to John 2 (ESV)

Zeal for Your House (2:13–22)

The prophets of Israel never tired of pronouncing judgment on corrupt worship. Jeremiah stood at the temple gates and declared its destruction (Jer 7:1–15). Malachi foretold a messenger who would prepare the way, but it was the Lord himself who would arrive suddenly at his temple, and Malachi asked who could endure the day of his coming, “for he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap” (Mal 3:1–2). Ezekiel watched as the glory of God left a sanctuary polluted by idolatry (Ezek 10:18–19). When Jesus entered Jerusalem and expelled the merchants and money-changers, he was not acting without precedent. He was acting as a prophet.

The Synoptic Gospels place this event during the final week of Jesus’s ministry, where it sets off the plot to arrest him (Matt 21:12–13; Mark 11:15–17; Luke 19:45–46). John, however, places it right at the start of his ministry, immediately after the Cana miracle. This change in position is almost certainly intentional. Such a rearrangement of events would not have surprised ancient readers. Biographers in the Greco-Roman tradition often moved events for thematic reasons, and the Gospel writers followed these same conventions.1 By positioning the cleansing here, John presents Jesus’s entire public ministry as a form of judgment against the corruption of the old way of worship. From the very first public action, the issue of the temple looms over everything that follows.

The interpretive weight of the passage rests on a citation from the Psalter. As Jesus drives out the merchants, a line from the Psalter comes to the disciples’ minds:

“Zeal for your house will consume me.” (Ps 69:9, quoted in John 2:17)

Psalm 69 functions in John mainly as a passion psalm. Its verses appear at the cross: the offer of vinegar to the thirsty Jesus (Ps 69:21; cf. John 19:28–29), the hatred without cause directed at him (Ps 69:4; cf. John 15:25), and the alienation from his own household (Ps 69:8; cf. John 7:5). The psalm is the cry of the suffering righteous one, and John references it here at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry.

What makes the citation in John 2:17 notable is a change in tense. The Septuagint reads κατέφαγέν με, an aorist: “has consumed me.” John’s quotation has καταφάγεταί με, a future: “will consume me.” The consumption is not yet finished. The zeal that drives Jesus to cleanse the temple will not end at the temple gates. It will lead him to the cross. From the moment the first table overturns, the shadow of the passion falls over the story.

The zeal that consumes Jesus, however, is not only zeal for a building. When his opponents demand a sign to justify his actions, Jesus replies:

“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19).

The Evangelist clarifies: “he was speaking about the temple of his body” (v. 21). The physical sanctuary is not the ultimate referent. Jesus himself is. The destruction he enacts in the courtyard points forward to the destruction of his own body, and the raising he promises points to resurrection. Ezekiel watched the glory of God depart from a defiled sanctuary. John has already announced that the glory has taken up residence in a new one (John 1:14).

The disciples did not understand this at the time. John is careful to say that they remembered the scripture only after the resurrection (v. 22). The citation is retrospective christology: the disciples see clearly only once they know how the story ends. Zeal for the Father’s house consumed the Son, and the consumption was his death and rising again. Psalm 69’s suffering righteous one, it turns out, was always pointing here.

January 2, 2026

In today’s reading, we explore the wedding at Cana and the cleansing of the temple. At the wedding, Jesus turns water into wine. In the temple, Jesus links his body to the temple and predicts his resurrection.

Two things stand out to me. First, because of Jesus, it’s time to celebrate. When the wine was all gone, Jesus made more. Because of what God has done in Christ, the world (and especially Christians!) should be celebrating!

Second, the link between Jesus and the temple isn’t random. The Spirit of God now dwelt on and in Jesus, not in the temple. The temple was a sign pointing to him, and both would share the same fate — destruction. One would be raised, and the other would be left with not one stone upon another. The true temple is here, so let us rejoice!

A Link to John 1

From Creation to Tabernacle (1:1–18)

Quick! Answer this question without looking up the answer: How does the book of Exodus end? Recent experience tells me that most people aren’t sure about the answer to this question, but the answer is actually pretty important for understanding the narrative arc from Genesis through Exodus.

Genesis starts with creation. God creates the world and his image bearers, then dwells with his people in the temple known as the Garden of Eden. Then Adam sins, and humankind is exiled from the garden and the presence of God. Tragically, God no longer dwells among his people.

Throughout the story that follows, God does appear at certain moments to be with his people, but these instances are just that: instances. God appears, and then he leaves.

But then, with an outstretched arm, God frees his people from Egypt and calls them to Mount Sinai, where he meets them on the mountain. And this time, God shows up, and he intends to stay. He gives Moses not just the Law, but also instructions for building the Tabernacle, the movable dwelling where God would live with his people as they traveled through the wilderness and into the Promised Land.

The book of Exodus concludes with God’s glory filling the Tabernacle.

³⁴ Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. ³⁵ And Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the cloud settled on it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle (40:34–35).

In that moment, the narrative arc of Genesis–Exodus was complete. The God who had at first dwelt with his people was now dwelling with them once again. But what does this have to do with the Gospel of John?

John draws on this very narrative arc in the introduction to his Gospel:

¹ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was in the beginning with God. ³ All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made (John 1:1–3).

The introduction begins with creation and then moves to presence and glory:

¹⁴ And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth (John 1:14).

The Greek word translated as “dwelt” is σκηνόω, from σκηνή, which means “tent.” This word is the one used for the Tabernacle in the LXX (the Greek translation of the Old Testament).1 John’s point is fairly obvious. The God who created the world and then dwelt with his people has come to dwell with his people once again in the person of Jesus. John wants his readers to see that Jesus is the tabernacling presence of the creator God back on earth once again, and that seeing him is to have seen the glory of God.

First Post (Jan 1, 2026)

Happy New Year! Thank you for signing up to Walk with Jesus in 2026! Each year, many people make resolutions for their health, finances, and habits—all good things. But what about our spiritual life? The Word became flesh. God has united himself to humanity forever, and that changes everything. As followers of Jesus, shouldn’t our resolutions be about following him more closely? About loving people more genuinely? We’re starting with John because there’s no better place to begin walking with Jesus than “In the beginning.” Happy reading!

A Link to John 20 (ESV)

The True Gardener (20:11–18)

John is the only Evangelist who tells us that Jesus was arrested in a garden (John 18:1), and he is also the only one who tells us that Jesus was buried in a garden (John 19:41). This repetition is intentional. John is sharing the climax of a story that started in a garden a very long time ago.

In Genesis, Adam was placed in a garden to tend and keep it (Gen 2:15). He was given one command, and he broke it, resulting in the loss of the garden. The ground, once a place of life and fellowship with God, became the land where thorns and thistles grew, where labor was cursed, and where death entered the human story (Gen 3:17–19). What followed was the long, painful story of a world east of Eden, trying and failing to find its way back.

John depicts the arrest and burial of Jesus in gardens to show that the story of Eden is coming to an end. The last Adam enters a garden not to tend it but to be taken from it, handed over to sinful men, tried, and crucified. He is laid in a garden tomb, as the curse of Genesis 3 reaches its darkest and fullest expression. The first Adam lost the garden through disobedience. The last Adam surrenders his life in obedience, taking upon himself the consequences of what the first Adam set in motion. Where the first Adam grasped, the last Adam gave. Where the first Adam hid, the last Adam was handed over. The garden, once the site of humanity’s greatest failure, becomes the place of its only hope.

The Sabbath ended quietly. Then, on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary went to the tomb. She found it empty, wept, and then turned around and saw a man she did not recognize. Thinking he was the gardener, she asked him where the body had been taken (John 20:15). John does not rush to correct her assumption, because at a deeper level, it’s not really a mistake. She stands in the garden where Jesus was buried, on the first day of a new week, looking at the last Adam, and she is more right than she knows.

The risen Christ is the true gardener of God’s new creation, come to restore what the first Adam lost.

The First Day of the Week (20:1–10)

Jesus was crucified on Friday, the sixth day—the day humanity was created (Gen 1:26-31). He rested in a tomb in a garden on the Sabbath, echoing God’s rest on the seventh day of creation (Gen 2:2-3). Then, “on the first day of the week,” he rose from the dead (John 20:1).

These days may seem like just historical details, but they point to a bigger reality.

Twice in John 20, John tells us it was “the first day of the week” (vv. 1, 19). But in Greek, the phrase is striking: τῇ μιᾷ τῶν σαββάτων—literally, “the first of the sabbaths.” Greek has its own perfectly good word for “week” (ἑβδομάς), but John intentionally chooses the Hebrew-rooted word “sabbath” instead.

Why? Because John wants us to see that something monumental has happened. The first week of the old creation has come to its end. God created the world, humanity sinned, God became human, God died, and God rested on the Sabbath in a tomb. The whole arc of the first creation points to this moment.

But when Jesus rises, he rises on the first day. A new week begins—the first week of the new creation. And what did God do on the first day of the first week of creation? He spoke into the darkness and said, “Let there be light” (Gen 1:3).

On the first day of this new week, God spoke into the darkness of death itself and said, “Let there be light.” And the Light of the world rose from the dead (John 8:12).

The Sabbath was always meant to point forward to the day when God’s rest—his completed work of creation and redemption—would fill the earth. The resurrection is that future arriving in our present. Jesus’ rising on the first day doesn’t leave the Sabbath behind; it fulfills it. The true Sabbath rest isn’t about stopping work one day a week. It’s about entering the rest that comes from living in the life of the risen Christ (Heb 4:9-10).

The resurrection isn’t just an event that happened on a specific day in history. It occurred on the first day of the new creation—a creation in which God is remaking everything by the same power that raised Jesus from the dead (2 Cor 5:17; Rom 8:11). We are living in that first week now, moving toward the true Sabbath rest that God always intended and making his Sabbath rest known here and now.

Made Known in the Breaking of the Bread (24:13–35; Easter)

I’m tired. I need to go to bed. I have Easter services in the morning.1

My favorite post-resurrection scene is the Road to Emmaus. Two disciples are walking with Jesus, but they don’t recognize him. When Jesus asks what they are talking about, Cleopas quips that he must be the only person visiting Jerusalem for the Passover who doesn’t know about what happened there. When Jesus asks for more details, Cleopas says hopelessly that he had hoped Jesus was the one to redeem Israel, but apparently that hope came to an end when the Romans crucified him. He adds that there have been reports of angels saying he’s alive and that the tomb is empty, but it doesn’t sound like Cleopas puts much faith in them.

Jesus responds:

“O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” (24:25–26).

Jesus then gives the greatest sermon/Bible study ever. Luke says:

And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself (24:27).

The thing is, even after Jesus opens the Scriptures for them, they still don’t recognize him.

The two disciples continue to walk with Jesus. Eventually, they find their way to the table, where Jesus “he took the bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to them” (24:30). This is almost word-for-word what Jesus does at his last Passover with his disciples (cf. Luke 24:31). And in that moment:

“Their eyes were opened, and they recognized him” (24:31).

They didn’t recognize him when he opened up Scripture to them, but as they report later, “he was known to them in the breaking of the bread (24:35).

The Road to Emmaus followed the pattern of early Christian worship. There is the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Sacrament. Both are important (and I say this as someone who has spent basically his entire adult life studying Scripture and teaching people), but Christ is made known in the breaking of the bread.

And people try to tell me that it’s not a sacrament, just a meal of remembrance.

Jesus gave the greatest study in Scripture that anyone has ever given (better than I or anyone else reading this will ever give), but they still didn’t recognize him. It was only when he took, blessed, broke, and gave that their eyes were opened, and they recognized their risen Lord.

Happy Easter.

“Be present, be present,
Lord Jesus Christ,
our risen high priest;
make yourself known in the breaking of bread.”

The Darkness

The Easter Vigil begins in darkness.

We gather outside around a new fire, carry its light with us into the sanctuary, and then sit and listen to ancient texts that remind us of the story of our salvation.

Creation. The fall. The flood. A burning bush. An army swallowed by the sea. A valley of dry bones. Three men in a furnace. A man in the belly of a great fish. Tonight, while the world is still dark, we have been listening to the long story of God and his world, and now we have arrived at last at the empty tomb.

But before we talk about the meaning of the empty tomb, I want us to think for a moment about the darkness that still surrounds us. That darkness has been lingering with us since Good Friday.

On Friday night, we stood at the foot of the cross and watched everything that matters in this world fail all at once. Justice was bent and broken. Beauty was turned into mockery. Freedom was denied as an innocent man was nailed to a tree. Truth was swallowed by imperial power. Power that was meant to defend and uplift the lowly crushed the one who had humbled himself as a servant. The one in whom heaven and earth met cried out in dereliction, feeling that he had been abandoned. And the one who had loved his own εἰς τέλος — all the way to the end — was abandoned by everyone he loved. Every broken signpost suddenly seemed to point to the same hill, the same cross, and the same man, and then he died. He was placed in a borrowed tomb, the stone was rolled in place, and that tomb, and the world along with it, went dark.

It is that darkness in which we started our service this evening, and that darkness still surrounds us now.

The darkness that begins on Good Friday, lingers through Holy Saturday, and is even here at the start of Easter, is the same darkness that was present before the world was ever made.

In the beginning, the earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And into that darkness, God spoke.

“Let there be light” (Gen 1:3).

On the first day of creation, God called light out of darkness. On the first day of the new creation, God speaks again, not with words, but with an act so powerful that the earth shook, the stone rolled back, and the light of the world walked out of an empty tomb alive, never to die again.

The Light Shines Backward

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the hinge on which all of history turns. And the light that came from that empty tomb does something remarkable: it shines in both forward and backward at once.

When we stand at the empty tomb and turn to look backward, the first thing that we see is the cross. If Jesus is supposed to answer our deepest questions about God, then, looking on the cross from the darkness of Good Friday alone, Jesus’ death appears to be a devastating, silent non-answer. You can feel this in the words of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. They have no hope. No joy. Only darkness. They say of Jesus that he was “a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people,” but the “chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death, and crucified him.” And then they add, “And now we’re just waiting for him to rise from the dead, just like he said!”

No. They say, “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” We had hoped, but the crucifixion put an end to that hope. In the darkness of Good Friday, the hopes and fears of all the years come crashing down against the might of an imperial cross.

But when Easter light shines in that darkness, something changes. What looked like defeat becomes victory. What looked like abandonment becomes oneness with the Father. What was an instrument of brutal death and torture becomes a symbol of life — eternal, resurrected life.

When the Easter light shines further back into the history past the cross of Jesus Christ, we begin to see that all of redemptive history, like the broken signposts, has always been pointing to Jesus Christ, even though we couldn’t see it until the light of the empty tomb shone backward into human history.

In Genesis 1 and 2, God creates the world and humanity, yet a divide remains between creator and creature. In the Incarnation, God becomes a human being, crossing that divide to be one with us. But when Jesus dies, he surrenders his Spirit to the Father. At that moment, the Incarnation could have been over. It would have been. If Plato had had his way, the Second Person of the Trinity could have left his body behind, returned to heaven as a spirit, and left the divide between God and humans in place forever. But the resurrection of Jesus Christ affirms the goodness of the world that God made, the goodness of the human body that God made, and the permanence of God’s union with humanity. He will forever be with us.

In Genesis 3, humanity is placed under the curse, begins to die, and is exiled from the Garden, the tree of life, and the presence of God. When Jesus Christ rises from the dead in a garden, he affirms that death no longer gets the last word in the story of our lives, that the curse is at last coming undone, and that he indeed intends to dwell with humanity forever.

Noah and Israel are both saved from water. Where they were spared the water, Christ went through it. Noah has the ark. Israel had dry land. But Christ was plunged into the depths of the water, as all human beings eventually are, and has come back out alive. Is it any wonder that Noah’s Ark and Israel’s crossing of the Red Sea are both signposts for Christian baptism?

In the marvel of the burning bush, we see that God can be present in the world, even as a blazing fire, and not consume his creation. God is present, but the bush is not destroyed. What God does in the bush, the resurrection affirms he will one day do for all the world.

Ezekiel envisions the long-awaited restoration of Israel and Judah as a valley of dry bones coming back to life. Resurrection was the metaphor of Israel’s restoration, but now, in the light of the empty tomb, the metaphor has become a reality, and it’s no longer just the hope of one family and one nation but the only hope of all the world.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are thrown into a furnace heated seven times hotter than normal. Nebuchadnezzar looks in and sees four men walking around unbound. The fourth, he says, is like a son of the gods. Three men went into the fire. Four are walking in it. The only things the fire destroyed were the ropes that bound them. In the light of Easter, we see that God does not rescue his people by keeping them out of the fire. Instead, he enters the fire with them. He is present with us in every darkness, every furnace, and every tomb. And when he walks out alive, he brings his people with him. The only things that do not survive God’s presence are the bonds that held and enslaved his people.

Then there is Jonah. Jonah is called to preach, but he runs in the opposite direction. The storm comes. He goes overboard. He goes down into the deep. Three days and three nights in darkness, in the belly of death. And then the fish vomits him onto dry land, and Jonah goes to Nineveh, and an entire city filled with enemies of the people of God repents. We do not have to guess what this story means. In the light of the empty tomb, Jesus tells us directly.

“For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matt 12:40).

The prophet who went down into the deep and came back up on the third day, who was then sent to preach to the nations — he was always pointing forward to the one who descended into death, rose on the third day, and then sends his people out to proclaim what God has done to the very ends of the earth. And yes, even to our enemies.

All these stories. All these rescues. They have always been pointing to Jesus, to his death and resurrection, in ways that no one could ever have imagined. But now, as the light of Easter shines backward into the pages of human history, we see he is where they have been pointing all along.

The Light Shines Forward

But the light of Easter does not only illuminate the past. It shines forward as well, and it gives us a new vocation.

Paul says it plainly in Romans 6:

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life (Rom 6:3–4).

The resurrection of Jesus is not only something that happened to him. It is something that is happening in us and will one day happen to us bodily. The same Spirit that hovered over the waters in the beginning, the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead, now dwells in those who belong to him. The new creation that began on that first Easter morning is still, by the power of that same Spirit, breaking into this world, and we, the baptized Spirit-filled people of God, are its heralds and its agents.

You may have noticed last night that I referred to the broken signposts as “vocational signposts” — seven features of human life that every culture in every age reaches for but cannot quite grasp: justice, beauty, freedom, truth, power, spirituality, and relationships. These broken signposts are not merely descriptions of what failed at the cross. That’s what we talked about on Good Friday. They are also descriptions of what the resurrection is in the process of repairing. And the Spirit of God, dwelling in the people of God, is the means by which that repair happens in the world. These signposts are also our vocation as resurrection people.

When we stand up for the innocent and fight for those to whom justice has been denied, we are not merely doing good deeds. We are making visible the God who vindicated the righteous sufferer of Psalm 22, who raised the just one condemned by an unjust world, who has promised to put all things right. We are living signposts of the resurrection.

When we create beauty — when we make art, tend gardens, sing well, build things worth looking at, and refuse to let ugliness have the final word — we are honoring the one through whose wounds a beauty has emerged that has been generating art and music and poetry for two thousand years. The resurrection does not despise the material world. It redeems it. And every act of genuine beauty is a testimony to the new creation already breaking into the present.

When we speak the truth at personal cost, when we refuse to let power define reality, when we live with integrity in a world of spin and half-truths, we are following the one who stood before Pilate and said that everyone who belongs to the truth listens to his voice. Truth is not merely a virtue. In the light of the resurrection, truth is an act of defiance against every empire and every corporation that has ever tried to make its own truth.

When we exercise power as service — when we lead by washing feet, when we spend ourselves for others rather than protecting ourselves, when we resist the seduction of dominance and choose the towel and the basin instead — we are embodying the kingdom that is not from this world, the kingdom whose king was enthroned on a cross and whose power death could not hold.

When we pray, when we worship, when we bring our darkness honestly before God rather than pretending it isn’t there, when we cry out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and trust that we will be heard — we are living at the intersection of heaven and earth, the place the resurrection has opened permanently for us and the Spirit now inhabits.

And when we love one another εἰς τέλος — all the way to the end, past the point where our love would naturally stop, through disappointment and betrayal and the sheer difficulty of other people — we are carrying into the world the love that went all the way to a cross and came back out of a tomb alive. We are witnesses that the last enemy of humanity shall be defeated, that death no longer writes the final word in the story of our lives, and that love, therefore, can afford to be as reckless and as costly as it wants to be.

In the light of the resurrection, all the broken signposts not only point to Christ, but they also point to our vocation in this world. To start the Easter service in the brightness of a new day is, symbolically, an act of over-realized eschatology. Christ has risen, but there is still darkness everywhere we look. The world is still full of broken signposts. Justice is still denied. Beauty still fades. Freedom is still elusive. Truth is still swallowed by power. Spirituality still reaches out for God but settles for cheap substitutes. Love still falters and fails.

But we are not people of the dark. The world is still sitting in the kind of darkness we gather in tonight. But we are the people of the resurrection, indwelt by the Spirit of the one who defeated death, and we are sent in his power to live in such a way that the broken signposts of this world begin to be repaired, one act of justice, one piece of beauty, one costly love at a time.

The light of the empty tomb does not merely comfort us. It sends us out into the darkness of the world with the light of Christ.

The Tomb is Empty

You can still visit Jesus’ tomb today, and, just as those first visitors did two thousand years ago, you will find it empty.

The Lord is risen, and in the light of that rising, everything looks different. The cross is not a tragedy but a victory. The broken signposts were not lies but merely needed to be seen from the other side. Darkness was not the end; the Light of the world has risen from the tomb.

Go from this place tonight, back into the darkness, and with your words and deeds, live as spirit-filled signposts, always pointing others back to your crucified and risen King.

Alleluia! Christ is risen.

The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

Amen.

Life Group Discussion Guide

Intro Prayer

Lord of light and life, thank you for the empty tomb and for an act so powerful that the earth shook and death lost its grip. As we open your word together, keep us from rushing past what this light in the darkness truly means. Give us eyes to see what the resurrection changes and ears to hear what it asks of us. Amen.

Ice Breaker

Has there been a moment in your life when something that looked like a dead end turned out to be a beginning? What was it?

Questions

1. Fr. Michael opens with the claim that the darkness of Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Vigil is the same darkness that preceded creation. What does it mean that God’s first act was to speak light into that darkness? What does it mean that he does it again at the resurrection?

2. The disciples on the road to Emmaus say “we had hoped.” The crucifixion had ended their hope. Have you ever been in a season where following Christ looked like defeat rather than a victory? What did the light of the resurrection change, if anything?

3. Fr. Michael reads the Old Testament stories backward from the empty tomb: Noah, Israel at the Red Sea, the burning bush, Ezekiel’s dry bones, Shadrach and his companions, Jonah. Pick one. What does the resurrection reveal about that story that you couldn’t see before?

4. The Incarnation could have ended at the cross. Jesus could have surrendered his spirit to the Father and left the divide between God and humanity in place forever. What does the resurrection say about the human body, the material world, and God’s intention to dwell with us?

5. The broken signposts are not only descriptions of what failed at the cross. They are also descriptions of what the resurrection is in the process of repairing. Which of the seven, justice, beauty, freedom, truth, power, spirituality, relationships, do you feel most called to work on? What would that look like in your actual life?

6. Fr. Michael argues that truth, in the light of the resurrection, is not merely a virtue but an act of defiance. What does it cost to speak truth in your context right now?

7. “Love can afford to be as reckless and costly as it wants to be” because death no longer gets the final word. Where in your life does that claim need to change how you love?

8. We are sent back out into the same darkness we came from. What does it mean to live as a signpost rather than as someone who has arrived?

Life Application

Choose one of the seven signposts this week and take one concrete step toward repairing it. Not a resolution but an action. One act of justice, one piece of beauty, one costly love. Bring it back to the next meeting and tell the group what happened.

Key Takeaways

• The resurrection is the hinge on which all of history turns. It shines backward into the past and forward into the future, and everything looks different in its light.

• God did not rescue his people by keeping them out of the fire, the flood, or the tomb. He entered those places with them and brought them through.

• The same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead now dwells in those who belong to him. The new creation that began on Easter morning is still breaking into the world.

• The broken signposts are not only descriptions of what failed at the cross. They are our vocation. We are sent to repair them, one act at a time.

• Because of the resurrection, love can afford to be reckless and costly. Death does not get the final word.

Ending Prayer

Lord Jesus, you walked out of the tomb alive, and everything changed. The cross became a victory. The darkness became the threshold of a new creation. The broken signposts became a vocation. Send us back out into the darkness with that light. Give us courage to work for justice, to make beauty, to speak truth, to lead by washing feet, and to love past the point where we would naturally stop. We are not people of the dark. Make us signposts of your resurrection, pointing others back to you. Amen.

This ancient homily, dating from the second to the fourth centuries and attributed to an anonymous author, has been treasured by the Church for centuries as a profound meditation on Holy Saturday, the day when Christ descended to the dead to free the captives held in the shadow of death. The homily imagines Christ’s descent into Sheol, where he confronts Adam and Eve—our first parents—and proclaims their liberation.1

Something strange is happening—there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh, and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh, and hell trembles with fear.

He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve, he who is both God and the son of Eve.

The Lord approached them bearing the cross, the weapon that had won him the victory. At the sight of him, Adam, the first man he had created, struck his breast in terror and cried out to everyone: “My Lord be with you all.” Christ answered him: “And with your spirit.” He took him by the hand and raised him up, saying: “Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.

“I am your God, who for your sake have become your son. Out of love for you and for your descendants, I now, by my own authority, command all who are held in bondage to come forth, all who are in darkness to be enlightened, all who are sleeping to arise. I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be held a prisoner in hell.

“Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead. Rise up, work of my hands, you who were created in my image. Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I am in you; together we form only one person, and we cannot be separated.

“For your sake, I, your God, became your son; I, the Lord, took the form of a slave; I, whose home is above the heavens, descended to the earth and beneath the earth. For your sake, for the sake of man, I became like a man without help, free among the dead. For the sake of you, who left a garden, I was betrayed to the Jews in a garden, and I was crucified in a garden.

“See on my face the spittle I received in order to restore to you the life I once breathed into you. See there the marks of the blows I received in order to refashion your warped nature in my image. On my back, see the marks of the scourging I endured to remove the burden of sin that weighs upon your back. See my hands, nailed firmly to a tree, for you who once wickedly stretched out your hand to a tree.

“I slept on the cross, and a sword pierced my side for you who slept in paradise and brought forth Eve from your side. My side has healed the pain in yours. My sleep will rouse you from your sleep in hell. The sword that pierced me has sheathed the sword that was turned against you.

“Rise, let us leave this place. The enemy led you out of the earthly paradise. I will not restore you to that paradise, but I will enthrone you in heaven. I forbade you the tree that was only a symbol of life, but see, I who am life itself am now one with you. I appointed cherubim to guard you as slaves are guarded, but now I make them worship you as God. The throne formed by cherubim awaits you, its bearers swift and eager. The bridal chamber is adorned, the banquet is ready, the eternal dwelling places are prepared, the treasure houses of all good things lie open. The kingdom of heaven has been prepared for you from all eternity.”

A Link to Luke 23 (ESV)

Into Your Hands (Luke 23:44–49)

The psalms of lament provided ancient Israel with a language for moments of crisis — words to express when the body weakens, enemies close in, and God feels far away. Israel’s faithful sufferers kept turning to these prayers, confident that God listened even to the darkest cries. Jesus dies within this tradition, using its language at his final breath.

Which Psalm he draws on, however, depends on which Gospel you read. Mark and Matthew both record a cry of dereliction as Jesus’ last spoken words: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Ps 22:1 quoted in Mark 15:34 and Matt 27:46). The weight of abandonment falls hard in those accounts.1 Luke’s account is strikingly different. Luke omits the cry of dereliction entirely. In its place, Jesus speaks three times from the cross (23:34, 43, 46), and every word is either a prayer or an act of grace. His final word is a quotation of Ps 31:5:

“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46).

Not a cry of dereliction; a prayer of trust. The wider context of Ps 31 shows a righteous sufferer surrounded by enemies, mocked and forgotten, yet holding onto God as his refuge. The psalmist does not doubt God’s listening; he trusts in it. Luke’s Jesus dies exactly this way: not in apparent abandonment but in deliberate, filial trust.

The word “spirit” (πνεῦμα) points to the full scope of biblical anthropology. When God formed man in Gen 2:7, he breathed life into dust, and the creature became alive as a combined body and spirit. Neither alone constitutes a complete human being. When Qohelet describes death, he states that the dust returns to the earth and “the spirit returns to God who gave it” (Eccl 12:7). In biblical terms, death signifies the unmaking of that union. Jesus on the cross intentionally and willingly fulfills Eccl 12:7: he entrusts the animating spirit, God’s own breath, given at creation, back into the Father’s hands.

The picture Luke paints is not the Greek view of an immortal soul escaping a disposable body. The spirit Jesus commits to the Father is not destined for eternal disembodied existence. God holds it until the resurrection, when it returns to the body, and Jesus becomes fully alive again in the biblical sense: body and spirit united. The resurrection is not a separate miracle added to the cross. It is the completion of what Jesus began with his final prayer.

Luke’s dying Jesus is the righteous sufferer of Ps 31, trusting, praying, entrusting himself to the Father’s care. And the Father, who holds the spirit of his Son, proves trustworthy when the tomb opens on the third day.

The Question We Carried Here

On Sunday, the city of Jerusalem asked a question.

The whole city was shaken, and the crowd asked, “Who is this?” In reply came a true but insufficient answer:

“This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee” (Matt 21:11).

The crowd thought they were asking about the man riding into their city on a donkey. But Jesus says,

“Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).

The claim of Christian theology, therefore, is that to ask “Who is this?” about Jesus of Nazareth is to be asking even deeper, more fundamental questions: “Who is God? What is God like? Where do we find him, and what does he look like when we do?”

The whole of Holy Week is God’s answer to the crowd’s question and to humanity’s deeper questions about God, the world, and our place in it.

On Thursday night, the answer started to take shape. There’s a towel, a basin, a broken loaf, a poured cup, a love moving εἰς τέλος, toward its completion. Tonight, the answer arrives in full. And the answer is not what anyone expected.

The Broken Signposts

The account of Jesus’ arrest, trial, and death in John 18 and 19 is the most devastating scene in all of Scripture. What makes it devastating isn’t just Jesus’s suffering but also the fact that everything human beings have ever cared about — everything we know deep down truly matters — fails all at once. That failure, that brokenness so evident in every detail of the Passion narrative, is one reason this harrowing story continues to have such a powerful effect today, even after two thousand years. Even in our rationalist, modernist, post-Enlightenment world, and even outside the church, this story continues to haunt and captivate our imaginations.

In History and Eschatology, N.T. Wright discusses what he calls “vocational signposts”—seven features of human life that appear across every culture and every era, things we all recognize as important even when we can’t fully explain why. These broken signposts are justice, beauty, freedom, truth, power, spirituality, and relationships. We strive for all of them. We can’t live without them. And yet we cannot quite grasp them the way we feel we should. They are like broken signposts—pointing somewhere real but ultimately failing to deliver on their promise.

What I want us to see today is what happens to each of these signposts when we stand, or even better, when we kneel, at the foot of the cross.

Justice. We long for justice. We yearn for wrongs to be righted and for the innocent to be protected. We don’t need to teach children about fairness; they learn all on their own to say, “That’s not fair,” the moment they feel the world’s scales are out of balance. A desire for justice is built into all of us, and yet, not only is justice so often denied to those who need it most, but we’re not even sure what to do about it. Pilate examines Jesus and says plainly: “I find no guilt in him” (John 18:38). He says it twice. Everyone in that courtyard knows Jesus is innocent. And yet, Pilate washes his hands, and he gives the order anyway. The signpost of justice, bent and broken as it is, points to an innocent man dying on a Roman cross.

Beauty. We crave beauty. We see it in other people, in a piece of music that captures us, in a landscape that takes our breath away, especially as the sun rises over the horizon. Yet, not only does beauty fade, but we also struggle to define it. No matter how hard we try to grasp hold of it, to hold onto it and make it last, it eludes us. It escapes us. On Good Friday, the soldiers twist together a crown of thorns and place it on Jesus’ head. They dress him in a purple robe and strike him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” What should have been a beautiful coronation has instead become a grotesque parody. The signpost of beauty is shattered on the floor of Pilate’s Praetorium.

Freedom. Every human being knows what it is to chafe against bondage, against oppression, against addiction, against the forces that diminish and enslave. We fight for freedom. We die for it. And yet freedom is always more elusive than we expect, and one person’s freedom almost always comes at another’s cost. The Passover was Israel’s freedom festival. Pilate tries to use it to release Jesus, but the crowd chooses Barabbas instead — an insurrectionist, a man of violence — because they want freedom but only on their own terms. The signpost of freedom points to a Roman cross and a final Passover that claims the life of God’s only Son and the true Passover lamb.

Truth. We long for truth, for something real and solid that can be trusted. We all know it is better to deal in truth than in falsehood, and yet lying, deception, and half-truths come so easily to us. Thanks to our modern 24-hour news networks, we don’t even know what truth is anymore. It all depends on what you’re watching and what you’re reading online. And yet we still long for it. Even worse, when corporations and politicians can buy and sell the truth as they see fit, we see again and again how easily truth is swallowed whole by power and money. Pilate asks Jesus about truth, and Jesus tells him that everyone who belongs to the truth listens to his voice. Pilate’s response is the response of every empire and every corporation: “What is truth?” (John 18:38). On Good Friday, the signpost of truth collapses under the weight of imperial power.

Power. We long for those with power to exercise it wisely and for authority that protects rather than crushes. And yet, as we see again and again, power always corrupts. Jesus announced a kingdom that was not from this world, and he redefined power as service. And then the machinery of Rome ground him into the earth outside the city walls. The signpost of power points, apparently, to an imperial boot stomping on a human face.

Spirituality. We long for God. We long for something more than the material world can offer. Our culture tells us that the dome above the earth is sealed, and if there is something or someone we might call “God,” he is very far away from us and has nothing to do with the mechanical workings of our universe. And yet we all find that this space is haunted in ways our secular age cannot explain. For decades, centuries now, we have been told again and again that the entirety of human existence can be explained by natural sciences, natural phenomena. Many people, despite everything our culture says, still seek out spirituality in various forms, and yet even the richest spiritual life can find itself plunged into darkness. From the cross, Jesus cries: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46). The one in whom the disciples had experienced the very presence of God now feels utterly and terribly alone. Despite our longing, the signpost of spirituality leads, quite literally, to a dead end.

Relationships. We long for love. We long for connections with other people. Even the most introverted among us know that we are made for it. And yet our deepest relationships and most intimate relationships so often disappoint, fracture, and ultimately end. Judas betrayed Jesus. Peter has denied him three times before the night is out. The disciples have scattered. The one who, on Thursday night, loved his own εἰς τέλος — all the way to the end — finds himself on the cross utterly and entirely abandoned. The signpost of relationships shatters at the loneliness of a Roman cross.

The world is full of these broken signposts, and yet every broken signpost converges on the same place. Every human longing arrives right here at a Jewish man dying outside the city walls, mocked, forsaken, and buried in a borrowed tomb. If the crowd’s question on Sunday was really a question about who God is, then the cross looks like a devastating non-answer. It looks like silence. It looks like the end.

Who Is God?

There is no way to reason upward from the broken signposts of this world to the God revealed at Golgotha. You cannot start with justice, beauty, freedom, truth, power, spirituality, or love, reach for them with everything you have, and arrive at a crucified Jewish peasant as the answer. The trail of broken signposts, followed forward, will not lead you here. But when you stand at the foot of the cross and read the story backward, you discover that this is where our deepest longings were pointing all along. The signposts were not wrong. We were reading them in the wrong direction.

That is the claim of Good Friday. To make sense of the world, to make sense of ourselves, to make sense of the longings in our hearts that we all feel but can’t quite grasp, and to answer the questions “Who is this?” and “Who is God?”, we don’t start elsewhere and try to work our way up because that will never work. Instead, we start here, on our knees, in the horror and agony of Good Friday, seen most clearly in the coming light of Easter Sunday, and we say, “Here I find the answer to my deepest questions. Here I find the answer to my deepest longings. Here I find the God who loved me εἰς τέλος, to the very end.

So, “Who is this?” Who is this man who entered the city with great fanfare only to be crucified a few days later? He is the one in whom every broken signpost finds its fulfillment and its end.

He is the just one, condemned by an unjust world so that justice might finally be established. He is the beautiful one, crowned with thorns and robed in mockery, through whose wounds a beauty emerges that has been inspiring art, music, and poetry for two thousand years. He is the truly free one, who could have called down angels to defend him but chose the cross instead, purchasing for us a freedom no insurrectionist could ever win. He is the truth, standing before a governor who asks, “What is truth?” and cannot recognize it when it looks him in the eye. He is the one who redefines power as a towel, a basin, and a pair of nailed hands, laid down willingly. He is the one in whom heaven and earth meet, the place where every spiritual longing for God finally arrives. And he is the one who loved us, εἰς τέλος, all the way to the end, when every other broken relationship had failed, and every friend had fled. Every broken signpost in the world has been pointing, all along, to this man, on this cross, on this day.

The fullest self-revelation of God in all of human history is a Jewish man dying outside the city walls — the just one condemned unjustly, the beautiful one crowned with thorns, the free one nailed to a cross, the truth dismissed with a shrug, the servant crushed by power, the spiritual one feeling abandoned by God, the one who loved to the very end forsaken by everyone he loved. The cross is not the interruption of God’s plan. It is the fulfillment of that revelation. The cross is God’s plan, written in broken signposts across the whole of human experience and the whole of Israel’s history, and now standing in full and terrible light at Golgotha.

So we do not rush past the pain of the cross to get to the joy of Easter. We stay here, in the silence, in the agony, in the horror, because there is no resurrection without this death, no Easter morning without this evening, no answers without first sitting with the full weight of all our questions.

The trail of broken signposts has led us here, to the ultimate broken signpost, and here at last, as Jesus hangs in agony on a Roman cross, suspended between earth and heaven, the two are united forever, and God is fully and finally revealed.

τετέλεσται.

Amen.

Life Group Discussion Guide

Introductory Prayer

Heavenly Father, on days like Good Friday, we come to you with heavy hearts and honest questions. Thank you for the cross. Thank you for the love that did not stop, even when it cost everything. As we gather tonight, slow us down. Keep us from rushing past the weight of this day. Open our eyes to see clearly what happened at Golgotha, and let it do its work in us. Amen.

Ice Breaker

Think of something you wanted badly that finally arrived and still left you wanting more. A relationship, an achievement, a moment. What was it?

Questions

1. N.T. Wright identifies seven things every human being longs for across every culture and era: justice, beauty, freedom, truth, power, spirituality, and relationships. Which of these do you feel most acutely in your own life right now? Where does that longing show up for you?

2. We tend to start with our longings and reach upward toward God. Why doesn’t that work? What changes when you start at the cross and read backward?

3. Pilate could look truth in the face and ask, “What is truth?” Where do you see that same blindness today in the world or in yourself?

4. The cross doesn’t look like an answer. It looks like silence, a dead end, and a failure. How do you hold that tension, especially on a day like today, before Easter has arrived?

5. Why is the temptation to rush past Good Friday to get to Easter so strong? What do we lose if we give in to it?

6. What does it mean to you personally that the fullest self-revelation of God is not power or glory, but a man dying outside the city walls, abandoned by everyone he loved?

Life Application

This week, pay attention to the places in your life where a signpost feels broken: a relationship that is fracturing, a longing for justice that goes unanswered, a spiritual dryness you cannot explain. Do not rush to fix it or explain it away. Bring it to the cross and sit with the question: what if this longing, in its very brokenness, is pointing somewhere?

Key Takeaways

• Our deepest longings for justice, beauty, freedom, truth, power, God, and love are not mistakes. They are signposts.

• Those signposts are broken. They point somewhere real but fail to deliver on their promise.

• You cannot reason your way from the broken signposts of this world to the God revealed at Golgotha. The trail only makes sense read backward, from the cross outward.

• The cross is not an interruption in God’s self-revelation. It is the fullest expression of it.

• There is no Easter without Good Friday. Do not skip it.

Ending Prayer

Lord Jesus, you are the just one condemned unjustly, the beautiful one crowned with thorns, the free one who chose the cross, the truth dismissed with a shrug, the servant crushed by power, the one who felt forsaken and loved anyway. Every longing we carry was pointing to you all along. Give us eyes to see it. Give us the courage to stay here, in the weight of this Friday, before we run to Sunday. We pray in your name. Amen.

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A Link to John 19

The Hyssop and the Lamb (19:28–30) – Good Friday

Every Passover, Israel rehearsed the same story. A lamb was slaughtered; its blood was applied to the doorposts with a branch of hyssop; the destroyer passed over; a people were freed (Exod 12:22). The hyssop was a simple, shrubby plant, but it carried the blood that meant life. On a Friday afternoon in Jerusalem, it appears again.

John carefully marks the moment. Jesus, knowing “that all was now finished” (John 19:28), speaks: “I thirst.” John adds that he said this “to fulfill the Scripture” — a signal to the reader that something specific is in view. The psalm behind the words is not hard to identify. The righteous sufferer of Ps 69 cries out: “for my thirst they gave me sour wine to drink” (Ps 69:21). Jesus does not improvis at the cross. He inhabits the script that Scripture prepared for him, right down to his final thirst.

A jar of sour wine sits nearby. Someone raises a sponge soaked in it on a branch of hyssop (ὑσσώπῳ) and holds it to his lips. The hyssop isn't just a small detail. John has been connecting the Passover symbols throughout his account of Jesus' passion: Jesus is crucified on the Day of Preparation, the afternoon when the temple lambs are slaughtered (John 19:14). Now, at the moment of death, the hyssop appears again. The evangelist shows us what is happening. Jesus dies as the true Passover lamb, and what Israel has been practicing for generations reaches its final point.

He drinks the sour wine and says:

“It is finished” (John 19:30).

τετέλεσται is not a cry of defeat. The verb τελέω conveys the sense of a task completed and brought to its destination. Jesus has used this language before. “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work,” he says at the well (John 4:34). In the Upper Room, John notes that Jesus loved his own “to the end” (John 13:1). In his prayer the night before: “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do” (John 17:4). The cross is not an interruption of that mission. It is the mission, arrived and fulfilled.

The hyssop that once bore Passover blood now touches the lips of the Passover Lamb himself. The psalm that voiced the righteous sufferer finds its final speaker. What Israel rehearsed for centuries, Jesus completes once and for all.

“We have a law!” (19:1–11)

“We have a law!” I hear phrases like this often these days—usually to explain why Christians can't (or won't) challenge laws that cause human suffering. After all, we're supposed to “be subject to governing authorities” (Rom 13:1), right? But does that biblical command really mean “If it's the law, it's the law,” and therefore “all good Christians” must comply without question?

The appeal “We have a law!” was often used against Jesus. “We have a law about the Sabbath!” “We have a law about ritual purity!” “We have a law about associating with the wicked!”

Now, that same language is used to condemn Jesus to death.

The Jews answered him, “We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die because he has made himself the Son of God”(John 19:7).

What happens when our laws oppress the innocent and even condemn them to death?1 How are we “good Christians” to respond to such laws? Should we obey? Should we assert Caesar’s right to bear the sword and the Christian’s duty to submit to governing authorities, regardless of the impact on human dignity, flourishing, and life?

And he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27).

To insist “We have a law!” while humans suffer and die because of that law is to align with those who condemned Jesus to death. It is to align with Caesar, Pilate, and the empires from this world in opposition to the kingdom of God that Jesus was establishing through his death and resurrection. It is to loudly and clearly declare, when faced with the true King who sacrifices himself so that others might live, “We have no king but Caesar” (John 19:15). 

The Night Is Already Sacred

Before Jesus speaks a word in the Upper Room, this night is already filled with meaning. The disciples knew exactly what meal this was. They had been celebrating it since childhood. The Passover carried its own liturgy, its own theology, its own weight. This night was a perpetual memorial of the Lord’s passing over the houses of Israel and delivering them from Egypt (Exod 12:14).

When Jesus enters the Upper Room, he doesn’t start from nothing. He steps into a complex web of existing meaning that gives shape to everything that happens not only tonight, but in the days to come.

Εἰς Τέλος

John begins the foot washing scene not with the action itself but with Jesus’ motivation. He writes:

Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end (John 13:1 ESV).

“To the end” translates two Greek words: εἰς τέλος. The word τέλος does not simply mean “until the last moment.” It carries the sense of completion, of a thing reaching its intended destination. Paul uses this same word when he writes that Christ is the τέλος of the law, not its termination but its fulfillment, the goal toward which the law was always pointing (Rom 10:4). When John says Jesus loved his own εἰς τέλος, he refers to a love that goes all the way, a love that is moving toward its completion.

And then Jesus gets up, takes a towel, and washes his disciples’ feet.

John takes care to tell us what Jesus knew when he did this:

Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him (John 13:3–5).

The Lord of heaven and earth, the one to whom the Father had given all things, the one who came from God and was returning to God, knelt down and washed the dirt from his disciples’ feet.

This moment isn’t just a solitary act of humility. John has already explained what it is. The foot washing is εἰς τέλος love in action. It represents love beginning its final move toward its fulfillment.

And that movement does not end in the Upper Room.

The Cross Before the Cross

Later in John’s Gospel, as Jesus hangs on the cross, he speaks one final word: τετέλεσται.

“It is finished” (John 19:30).

The word has the same root as τέλος. On the cross, Jesus’ love for his disciples is reaching its painful, agonizing fulfillment.

In connecting these two scenes, John is not being accidental. He is showing us that the foot washing and the cross are part of the same continuous story. Jesus kneels in the Upper Room on his way to the cross. Both the towel and the nails are steps in the same journey, a single act of love that began moving εἰς τέλος, towards its fulfillment, and did not stop until Jesus could say τετέλεσται. Finished. Complete. There was nothing left to give. And so his love had reached its goal.

The foot washing is the cross before the cross.

The Night He Was Betrayed

When Paul reminds the Corinthians of this night and the institution of the Eucharist, he writes:

“For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread” (1 Cor 11:23).

Paul is well aware of the Passover connection. He is the one who writes elsewhere that “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Cor 5:7). He understands the typology. He understands the theology. But here, when he discusses the night itself, he zeroes in on its moral darkness.

This is not only the night on which Jesus knelt down and washed his disciples’ feet. This is not only the night on which Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper. This is not only the night on which Jesus gave his disciples a new commandment. This is also the night on which Jesus was betrayed.

That truth adds to the full weight of what is happening in the Upper Room. Jesus knows what Judas is about to do. He knows what Peter is about to do. He knows that when the soldiers come, all of them will scatter, and he will face his death alone.

Jesus could have run. He could have called down angels to fight for him. He could have told Peter to keep out his sword and fight εἰς τέλος, to the very end.

Instead, he takes the bread. He takes the cup. And he gives himself anyway.

The same love that will say τετέλεσται tomorrow was demonstrated dramatically on the night of Jesus’ betrayal.

As we picture the Upper Room, we recognize our place in that story. We are not naturally faithful. We are those who have turned away from Jesus in obvious and subtle ways. We have seen him humble himself by washing feet, and then we have silently or even openly asked:

What about me?

What about my comfort?

What about my position?

What about my reputation?

What about doing things my way?

That is who we are, and this meal is for us anyway. The love that is perfectly fulfilled on the cross as Jesus dies was given on the night that the betrayers sat at his table.

Come to the Table

So when we come to that table tonight, what we receive is the body and blood of a love that went all the way. This love knelt in the Upper Room, washed feet, and did not stop until it reached the agony and shame of the cross. This love was given on the night of betrayal, and still it did not flinch. When this love reached its τέλος, Jesus said τετέλεσται, bowed his head, and gave up his Spirit. In that moment, love was complete, and its work was finished. There was nothing left to give.

With that gift, Jesus left us a commandment.

“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another” (John 13:34).

Notice the threshold. The standard for love among his disciples is no longer simply “as you love yourself,” which is already a lot. The standard now is “as I have loved you,” which is εἰς τέλος, the kind of love that washes feet on the way to a Roman cross.

The question this commandment puts to each of us is not whether we love. We know how to love. Everyone reading this sermon loves someone. The question is where our love stops.

Every one of us has a stopping point. We love people until they have disappointed us one too many times. We love people until loving them threatens something we are protecting, our rights, our privileges, or our social standing. We love people until the cost exceeds what we are willing to pay. We reach the edge of our love, and we stop.

Jesus’ love for us never stopped. He loved through betrayal, through denial, through abandonment, through the cross. He loved even when he was beaten, spit upon, and whipped. He loved even as nails were driven through his hands and feet. He loved εἰς τέλος, and then he said τετέλεσται, because his love had nothing left to give.

The meal we are about to receive gives us the one who loved us to the very end. “This is my body. This is my blood.”

We cannot generate this kind of love from within ourselves. But we can receive it, and what we receive at the table is precisely the love that went all the way, a love given to us so that it can begin to move through us toward one another.

So come to the table as people whose love has stopped short. Come as sinners who need a Savior. Come as disciples who can only live by what they receive.

Receive the body of the one who knelt with a towel on his way to the cross. Receive the blood of the one who gave himself on the night of betrayal. Receive the love that has loved you to the very end.

Tomorrow, Jesus will say τετέλεσται. Tonight, he gives himself to us in bread and wine and says, “Love one another as I have loved you.”

Amen.

Life Group Discussion Guide

Intro Prayer

Lord Jesus, we come to you tonight in the shadow of the cross. Thank you for the upper room, for the towel and the basin, for a love that did not stop when it had every reason to. As we open your word together, give us eyes to see what is really happening in that room and what it means for us. Amen.

Ice Breaker

Has someone ever done something for you that genuinely surprised you, an act of service or kindness you did not expect and did not feel you deserved? What was it?

Questions

1. John tells us that Jesus loved his disciples εἰς τέλος, to the end, toward completion. What is the difference between a love that is convenient and a love that is moving toward its fulfillment? What does that distinction change?

2. Before Jesus picks up the towel, John makes a point of telling us what Jesus knew: that the Father had given all things into his hands, that he had come from God and was going back to God. Why does that knowledge matter? What does it tell us about what the foot washing actually is?

3. Paul, writing to the Corinthians about the Lord’s Supper, does not call it the night of the Passover or the night of the new commandment. He calls it the night Jesus was betrayed. Why do you think he frames it that way? What does that framing add?

4. Jesus calls his disciples to love one another not as they love themselves but as he has loved them. What is the difference between those two standards? Which one costs more?

5. Where does your love tend to stop? What are the most common reasons that cause it to fall short?

6. The foot washing and the cross are part of the same continuous act of love. In what sense is the foot washing the cross before the cross? What does it mean that the towel and the nails are steps in the same journey?

7. Jesus washed the feet of Judas. He gave the cup to Peter, who would deny him three times before morning. What does it mean that this meal, this love, was given on the night of betrayal, to the betrayers?

8. The claim of the table is that we receive a love we cannot generate ourselves, so that it can begin to move through us toward other people. What would it look like, practically, for that to happen in your life this week?

Life Application

Identify one relationship where your love has stopped short, because of disappointment, hurt, or the cost of continuing. This week, bring that relationship to the table. You do not have to manufacture something you do not have. Ask instead to receive what you cannot produce, and then take one step.

Key Takeaways

• The foot washing and the cross are not two separate events. They are one continuous act of love moving εἰς τέλος toward its fulfillment.

• Jesus knew exactly what Judas and Peter were about to do. He washed their feet and gave them the cup anyway.

• The standard of the new commandment is not “as you love yourself.” It is “as I have loved you.” That is a different category entirely.

• Every one of us has a stopping point. The question is not whether we love but where our love stops.

• What we receive at the table is not only a model to imitate but a love to receive, one that can then move through us toward the people around us.

Ending Prayer

Lord Jesus, you loved your own to the end. You knelt on the floor of the upper room on your way to the cross, and you did not stop. We confess that we stop. We stop when it costs too much, when the person has disappointed us too many times, when loving them threatens something we are protecting. Forgive us, and give us what we cannot give ourselves. Let the love that said τετέλεσται begin to move through us toward the people in our lives who need it most. Amen.

A Link to John 13 (ESV)

The Lord Who Kneels (13:1–20)

The night before Passover, Isaiah’s Servant and Lord takes a towel.

Israel had long anticipated the one who would bear the shame no one else would bear (Isa 52:13–53:12). He would humble himself to a place of disgrace and accomplish what earthly power never could. John begins his account of Jesus' death not with an arrest but with a basin. Jesus gets up from the table, sets aside his outer garment, and starts to wash his disciples’ feet (John 13:4–5).

That night, Jesus washed feet that he had created.

John’s language is intentional. The verb he uses for “laid aside” (τίθησιν τὰ ἱμάτια) reflects the language Jesus uses elsewhere about laying down his life: “I lay down my life that I may take it up again” (John 10:17). In the same way, when the washing is finished, Jesus picks up his garments again (John 13:12).

The footwashing is more than just a lesson in servanthood. It is the cross, enacted in miniature the night before it happens. Jesus’s life is one continuous downward movement: from the right hand of God, to a manger in Bethlehem, to a basin in the upper room, to a cross outside the city walls (Phil 2:6–8).

It is worth noting that John does not record the words of institution. He mentions no broken bread, no cup, no “This is my body” or “This is my blood.” For John, the footwashing already says it all. The Lord who stoops to wash his disciples’ feet is interpreting his own death before it happens.

Peter understands none of this. His protest, “You shall never wash my feet” (John 13:8), is not rudeness; it is instinct. But Jesus’s answer is firm:

“If I do not wash you, you have no share with me” (John 13:8).

Discipleship does not begin with what you do for Jesus. It begins with receiving what you cannot do for yourself. The one who refuses to be washed cannot belong to the one who washes.

The Passover setting deepens the scene. John places the footwashing explicitly “before the feast of the Passover” (John 13:1), and the “clean/not clean” exchange that follows already has Judas in view (John 13:10–11). Jesus is preparing a people for a New Exodus in which people are cleansed by him through the washing with water.

The ὑπόδειγμα he leaves them (John 13:15), usually rendered “example,” is more than an ethical pattern. It is the shape of the community he is forming: “As I have done to you, you also are to do” (John 13:15). The cross not only saves us. It reshapes us.

On this night, before the bread is broken and the cup is raised, the Lord of heaven and earth gets down on his knees as the servant of all. Go, and do likewise.

A New Commandment (13:31–35)

We want to reach the lost. We aim to evangelize all nations and peoples. We want (to quote our vision statement) “to see the world, especially the places in which we live, work, and worship, filled with disciples of Jesus Christ.”

But how will the world identify us as his disciples?

Surely, it will be through our exegetical skill and theological insight. Surely, it will be our ability to parse Greek verbs and quote the church fathers from memory. Right?

“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (13:34–35).

When I typed the words “Christian hate” into Google just now, the top result was a Reddit post titled “Why is there so much hate in Christianity?” When I scrolled down a little further, I found this question on Quora: “If Jesus Christ preached love, why do Christians show so much hate?”

The phrase “so much” really stands out to me in both questions. It’s not just that Christians are so widely known for hatred that people are questioning online how it could be so, but rather that Christians are known for “so much” hatred.

But Jesus commands us to love: love God, love your neighbor, and love one another.

That is how all people will know that we are his disciples. If we want to reach the world and save the lost, it starts with love.

And if you want to see what love looks like, it looks like kneeling to wash the feet of someone who will deny you and someone else who will betray you fatally.