Postmodern Faith - Tim King

Postmodern Faith

One of the blessings we get from being able to read the gospel accounts of the ministry of Christ, is we get to see him relate to his culture in very practical, yet profound ways.

The imagery used by Jesus almost seems to flow from him as naturally as water flows from one of our cool mountain streams here in Colorado. Almost effortlessly, it seems, Jesus is able to relate to his audience without trying to impress upon them all of the ideals we’ve seemed to inherit from our Modern World paradigms.

For instance, in our lesson today we come to John 12:23-26 and a seminal teaching about the collective or corporate role the body of Jesus will serve.

For Jesus, in his day, his time, his culture, the collective was the focusin other words, the whole group, the whole nation, the whole worldhe wasn’t under the constraints of the Modern age with all of its attention focused upon the individual. For Jesus, the individual was swept up in the larger plan, the larger story of God. So the first thing we will see in this account, is that the focus of Jesus was on the whole.

Listen to his teaching: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” John 12:23-24

In an agricultural age such as the one Jesus ministered to, nothing could be worse than a man too lazy to plant and harvest his own fields. Imagine, Jesus would reason, the horror of finding good seed that had not been planted in order to bring forth a bountiful crop. Who could conceive of it?

In the same way, imagine Jesus coming to bring us to the Father and refusing to die and be buried in order to accomplish bringing forth the harvest of God! His sole purpose in life was to live for the many—even if it meant denying his own personal ambitions or desires.

For Jesus, as he would say next, “Those who love their life will lose it,” but those who are willing to live for something much higher, much more noble; a life lived for the greater good, lived for the world in this would they find the true meaning of life. Life, as designed by God, is to be devoted, planted, on behalf of others.

Keeping our lives to ourselves is no less shame and tragedy than an unplanted seed. The story is simple. It is timely. It is culturally relevant for an agricultural age.

But how does the church tell this story in the 21st century? If we choose the constraints of the modern world and age with all of its esteem for logic, we’d most likely pull out an outline that proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, step by step, the entire process of planting, decay, the root system, the role of photosynthesis in bringing about growth and then we’d finish it off with an undeniable theorem straight from Warren’s guide of logic. The argument would be lock-tight and we would proudly tell others that we could create such a presentation because of our “former training in seminary.”

If you think this is an over-the-top, imagined scenario, just look at the way the fulfilled prophecy world goes about making its case today. Worshipping at the altar of the Modern age, logic is still esteemed over compassion, charity and mercy.

How might a “postmodern” account of this teaching go if Jesus were among us today? Perhaps it would go something like this: Here we stand in an age of chaos. The world around us is changing at the speed of light and because of this, many of us feel uneasy, unstable and just downright exhausted trying to accommodate all of the things that are pulling us into a fragmented ball of emotions.

At least we can be thankful for one thing, we have these multi-tasking machines we call computers. Literally a modern marvel. As much as I don’t like my computer freezing up from time to time, I’m at least glad that our software is improving the way it runs now versus the first computer I purchased years ago. Thank goodness and Bill Gates for that!

It’s quite a blessing to have software in common and be able to instant message, email each other, send photo’s, music and even video back and forth.

Remember how frustrating it was to try to get others up to speed with these things? Knowing that there were so many good things you could share if others would only load the same software you had.

I guess in a way, that’s sort of how I see the work of the one we call God. Like the mind of computers, He made us in his image—capable of processing many awesome and wonderful thingsand he’s adding more all of the time.

Some of us though, have old versions that need to be updated. There are programs we need to load in order to receive all the mail and attachments God wants to send.

Unless a person loads the software, it does little good getting connected to others, connected to God. We’re not talking about worth or value or even how much He will love us even if we don’t load it we’re really just talking about the multitude of awesome gifts that await us if we do. The software is free just take it out, load it up, and begin to receive.

Well, maybe that’s the way the story would go and maybe not. But one thing is for sure, if we’re going to take the approach to life and love and service that Jesus took, we’ll be speaking to our audience in the same simple, yet profound ways he spoke to his.

There’s a great story to be told and it still aims at the heart and refuses to let the logic of our world take center-stage over the story. Just think about it. Until next time, God bless have a great week everybody.

This webcast is the eighteenth program in a series on "The Gospel of John." Listeners are encourage to read along in the Gospel as a way to delve deeper into this study.

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The Gospel of John, Pt 18, May 26, 2004