Transcript
On the Thursday night of Holy Week, we have what we call the Thursday night discourse. It appears in John's Gospel in chapters 13, 14, 15, 16. Then there's the high priestly prayer of our Lord. It starts with the Lord's Supper, the washing of the disciples' feet, the Lord's Supper, and then our Lord dialogues with the disciples. And they hear from Jesus during that Thursday night discourse some of the amazing promises our Lord makes. He makes the
promise of eternal life, of heaven. He says, my Father's house are many rooms, if it were not so what I told you that I'd go and prepare a place for you. He makes the promise, because I live, you will live also. He makes the promise of the Holy Spirit, I will not leave you orphaned. I will send the Comforter, the one who will come alongside of you, teach you everything concerning me. He also calls the disciples
to fruitful discipleship. He tells them, I'm the vine, you're the branches. If you abide in me, you bear much fruit. And it seems to me the kind of convergence point in that Thursday night discourse comes in the 15th chapter, following that statement about the vine and the branches. And following that, Jesus makes a promise of friendship to the disciples. And I want to look at that particular paragraph for us during the middle of this forum we're
having on youth ministry. So if you have a New Testament, want to open up to the 15th chapter of John, I want to particularly focus on one paragraph there. Starting with verse 15, if you love me, you will keep my commandments. Chapter 15 verse 12, this is my commandment, that you love me, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, than a man lay down his life for
his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing. But I have called you friends for all that I have heard from you, all I've heard from my father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit
should abide. So that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. This I command you to love one another. That's a promise of friendship. It's a marvelous promise. You are my friends. And Jesus gives four proofs of the friendship. He gets two proofs from his side and two proofs from our side. Take a look at those proofs. First the proof from his side. This is my commandment, that you love one
another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man or woman than this, than someone lays his or her life down for his friends. You are my friends. The first proof of the friendship that Jesus Christ gives is an ancient proof. Probably the most ancient of all proofs is a friend is someone who does something for you. And Jesus uses that ancient proof of the friendship as the first proof from his side. You are my
friends and the proof is I lay my life down for you. Now this is given the Thursday night that the disciples of our Lord have no way of understanding what this is going to really mean. They're going to have to see what this means within hours. They're still thinking of the victory of Palm Sunday. They're still thinking of the power and the support of a great crowd of people. Little do they realize that within hours they'll
see what this means. But our Lord makes the promise on that Thursday night. You're my friends and the first proof of it is what I do for you. That's a very ancient proof. We still use that proof to test friendships ourselves. We test friends by what they will actually do for us. When push comes to shove, a friend is someone who does something for you. And our Lord makes the profoundness of all promises in that regard.
I'll lay my life down for you in your behalf. And that's the proof of the friendship. Have you ever thought about the fact when you're out, suppose you're out driving in your car and you get out in the country road. It's one o'clock in the morning and your car breaks down. Have you ever noticed how quickly your brain, like a computer, will calculate your friendships by this ancient criteria? You use this same criteria. And let's
make it really a white-knuckle example. You don't have AAA as your sort of institutional friend, so you don't have that friend to call. And you're one o'clock in the morning, you're broken down. You go through the roster pretty fast of the tennis club and the rotary club and maybe the church roster, too, to find, is there somebody that I could call at one o'clock in the morning that would come out and tow me
in, come out and help me get my car going? And notice, if you're a lucky person, you have one or two people that would give the shirt off their back for you. And you consider yourself pretty lucky because you have a friend who is willing to do something for you. That's an ancient proof. And I find it moving that our Lord would give that proof as the first test, the first proof of friendship on his side.
Now, the second proof is an expansion of the first, but it's not put in heroic terms. It's where our Lord says, you're my friends. I don't call you servants. The servant does not know what his master is doing, but I've called you friends. For all that I've heard from my father, I've made known to you. Now, that's another proof of friendship. It's more subtle, but it's an expansion of the first. It's an ancient test also. A
friend is someone that you take into your confidence. Jesus says, I'm not going to call you slaves. A slave doesn't know what his master's doing. I'm going to call you friends because everything that I've heard from my father, I've made known to you. I've taken you into my confidence. Now, that's a profound mystery, the mystery of the fact that God would take us into his confidence. It's part of the mystery of what prayer is. It's interesting
to me that the Old Testament word Pala, the Hebrew word for prayer, that is often translated as intercession in the Old Testament, literally in Hebrew is the word to think, to think with God when God dialogues with us, thinks with us, and that that should be one of the words for prayer. Prayer is not only asking. Prayer is also being in a relationship in which you're being taken into the confidence of God when God talks with
Moses, and he takes Moses into his confidence. He takes us into his confidence, and our Lord uses that as another ancient proof of friendship. Hey, by the way, we use that also. We calculate friendships that way. Here, let me give you an example. Supposing you went home for the weekend. You're a student here at Princeton Seminary, and you go to New York City for the weekend, and you have a midterm here on Monday, and you go
up there, and you take all your books with you, and naturally you're going to study, and you're going to do research during the weekend, and so you go up there, you ride the train up to New York, and then you get in with your friends, and there's a big event over there, NYU or something you have to go to, well, I can't quite study, and then Sunday, you naturally go to church, and then youth fellowship, because
you want to see all your old friends, and then you have a big family dinner, and then there's a football game on, and you just didn't quite get around to studying, but I've got the ride back on the Penn Station, get on that marvelous train, and I'll be able to study all the way back to Princeton, especially the little run from Princeton Junction Inn. I can study there. Those are old train cars, too. There's still arrows
in those cars. But I can study all the way back, and I'm counting on that fact, and so though I blew the whole weekend, I'm able to study. All right, now with that in mind, you go to the platform there at Penn Station. You're about to get on the train. Have you ever had this happen? You're standing on the platform. Maybe there's eight cars in the train, and you're standing there, and down on the platform, you
see out of your eye someone who's an acquaintance. Maybe they go here to school. They don't see you. Now, that's a social moment of truth. They don't see you. You see them. Am I right? Does your brain quickly calculate the friendship level that you have with that person? You say to yourself, oh, man, they don't see me. You don't want to be social faux pas, so you don't actually snuggle. But if they see you, then they'll
say, oh, are you going to Princeton? Yes. Hey, we'll ride together. OK. And then they're going to tell you about their trip to Europe. They're going to maybe share illnesses they've got, things like that, for your prayers and all. But still, they're going to share all that with you and flunk your exam. So notice what you do. This is where the New York Times comes in handy. You start reading it. You don't look at them. Out
of the corner of your eye, they go in one train car. You go in another car. You face in the opposite direction. Is that true? You sit in an A seat on a plane and hope no one sits in the B seat so you don't have to witness all the way to Chicago. I mean, you've got to do a lot of work. You're counting on that two hours on that train to study. I've got a midterm.
I've got a face. I don't want to talk to anybody. Notice what you did. You calculated in your brain the friendship quotient, the friendship level of that person. And you said, they're an acquaintance and all that, a nice guy and all that, but they're not that good a friend, that I want to sit and talk to them for two hours. OK. I can make this romantic if I wanted to. Supposing you're standing there and you look
down the station and it's a person you've been wanting to meet all year here at school. You've seen them at a distance. And you say to yourself, you know, this is a moment of destiny. I have been trying to meet this person my whole year, and they're a classmate of mine. I've never had just the right moment. I go up and say, hey, you go to Princeton? Yeah, hey, you want to walk? Yeah, great. And then
you say to yourself, I'll flunk that exam. What difference does it make? This is my whole life. Notice what you did. You calculated the friendship level. I have a variation on this, though, too. If it was really a good friend, you could go up that person and say, are you going back to Princeton? Yes, I am. You want to ride the two hours with me? Yes. You want to keep your mouth shut the whole way? I've
got to study. I mean, I can study. You can pray quietly for me. I don't want to hear about Europe. I don't want to hear about illnesses. I care and all that. But I don't want to hear now. OK. See, as a friend, I could take the person into my confidence. That's what our Lord says is a test of friendship. He, and this is a mystery, is that he would want to take us into his confidence.
And I think that puts the mystery of prayer at an entirely different level than we thought. It's the friendship level. Prayer is an experience between friends, according to this text. OK. There are also two proofs of the friendship from our side. And the one at first baffled me when I first read this text. In fact, when I was studying this text at the beginning, I thought, you know, I love the way the text begins. This is
my commandment that you love one another's. I've loved you. Greater love hath no man or woman than this, that he lay his life down for his friends. You're my friends. I love that. And then I thought the next line ruined it. If you do what I command you. When I first saw that word command, it kind of stirred me, stunned me. If you do what I command you, what kind of a friend is this, like the
mafia? Where you if you just a doormat and do everything I say, then you can be my friend. And at first, that's what I thought this text was saying. In fact, when I first looked at this text, I thought it was a text on obedience. In fact, I've heard this preach that way as if this is an obedience passage. And that means if you obey all the things that Christ commands and you can be his friend.
Well, that means he has no friends. Because when our Lord gets through the law, for instance, Ten Commandments, and we finish reading the Sermon on the Mount, we realize it's impossible to do all the things that Jesus commands. He makes it impossible. So is that what this text is about? That he's saying if you obey all my commands, then you can be my friend? I know I don't think that's what this text is about at all.
And the context proves it. When I looked at this more closely and looked at the context of this, it's like a this is like a Hebrew poem. It starts and it ends with the same line. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, a man laid out his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. And then
I realize in the context of this passage, there is one command that Christ has in mind as the proof of his friendship. And that's the command that begins the passage, and he ends the passage the same way so there can be no mistake. At the end of this paragraph, he reminds them, and this is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. That's the proof of the friendship. He's not saying all my
commands. Now don't get me wrong, I think Jesus wants us to obey all his commands. But he doesn't make that the test of friendship here. The test of friendship is this one command. He says you prove you're my friends with this one commandment. If you love one another as I have loved you, it's love for the brother that's going to, sister, that's going to prove your friendship. Let me see if I can illustrate that. Have you
ever visited a great estate? You know, like a great house with someone, maybe you have a friend that's a caretaker at a great house, and they invite you, that's true around Princeton, there's some huge estates, and somebody says, hey, I'm going to give you a tour of the estate. And then you go and get a tour of it. Have you ever had an experience like that? When I was a boy, I lived in McLeod, California, five
miles from the estate of William Randolph Hearst, one of the greatest estates in America, called Wintoon, just five miles from my home. I've been in it lots of times. And supposing I was getting a tour by the caretaker, taking me on a tour, I can still remember that estate. You know, his mother, Phoebe Atkinson Hearst, bought a castle in Germany, this is true, and had it dismantled stone by stone and brought to McLeod River and rebuilt
in McLeod River. That's how great the Hearst estate was. And if you saw Citizen Kane by Orson Welles, that scene where all the editors meet with the Hearst is supposed to be at Wintoon. It is a huge barren old estate on the McLeod River. Supposing you're getting a tour, your friend says, oh, look at the swimming pool, what do you think of that? Marble, imported from Europe. And then you see, of course, the great barren old
estate. I remember the great doors were all huge wooden doors. You walk through the doors, and you go into the hallway, and over to the left is a huge dining room. I can still remember it. In fact, in that Citizen Kane film, they have a film of all the people sitting at that dining room. The table could hold about 75 or 80 people. Imagine, you look at it, oh, wow. And then the walls, tapestries, imported from
Europe. And then you go into the grand hall, this huge hall, and then up the stairway going up to Mr. Hearst's private quarters where he and Marion Davies lived, up there. Oh, ooh. And then, can't go up there. And then you see this huge hall, and it's all just absolutely gorgeous. And right in the middle, a marble table. And on the table, an alabaster vase imported from Egypt. And in the vase, one single Daffodil, sort of
understated. And then the light shining in through the windows, through the alabaster vase. And by now, you're simply a gob going through the estate. And you look at that vase, and you say to your friend who's giving you the tour, wow, I have never seen such a beautiful vase. That is such a beautiful vase. Wow, this is such a beautiful place. And your friend, giving you the tour, says, you like that vase? Oh, man, I think
it's beautiful. Take it, it's yours. You can have it. You see, I'm a very good friend of the owner. He'd want me to give it to you. Okay, I have to stop my parable there for one minute to rule out two terrible possibilities because they would destroy the parable. The first possibility is that your friend has worked at the estate too long. And he's become, you might say, just a little confused. It's like being in a
bank and handling all that money and thinking it's yours. He thinks that he can do that, and that would ruin my parable. The second thing that would ruin the parable is if your friend is really a thief and he's just trying to get you to sneak out the alabaster vase and then he'll come later, collect it with you, and then we'll go sell it at a fence or something like that. That would ruin the parable. All
right, but now, if you rule out those two terrible possibilities, now listen closely, what has your friend just proved to you when he gave you the vase? He proved to you that he was a very good friend of the owner or he could never have given it to you. And I think that's what Jesus is saying in this parable. When our Lord says, this is my love for you, now here's a proof of the friendship on
my side, my love, a proof of the friendship on my side, I take you to my confidence, a proof of the friendship on your side when you give away this best gift in the castle that I have. See, when you obey this command. You know, it's very interesting. The love you give is not a love you get to generate. Jesus is not scolding us into loving. I love Karl Barth's great insight into Christian ethics. It's an
evangelical ethic. We love because he first loved us. It's a love that we don't originate. It's a love that starts with him. We get to be a conduit. We get to give it out. And we prove we're his friend when we do it. That's what proves we're his friend. You remember the old television series, Magnum P.I.? It's still on reruns, late at night. When I was, my kids were little, they used to love to watch that
film. My wife and my daughters especially liked that show. They liked it. Detective stories, I guess. But I never... I always watched, because I think the family that watches television together stays together and all that sort of thing. But I wanted to watch it because they love to watch it. I frankly, my favorite detective story is the Columbo series. I like that. That's my kind of detective. I didn't like the Magnum P.I. that much. For one
thing, I think Tom Selleck was a little wimpish in that show. He was kind of always whining and that sort of thing. But one thing I did like in that show was Higgins. Higgins was my favorite character in that show. Kind of, you know, pompous and all the rest. But the interesting thing about that show, and my wife will agree, and my kids too, they agree, that from the very beginning of that show, I told them
I do not buy the storyline. I don't agree with the storyline. I don't buy it. Because the storyline is that there's a huge estate in Hawaii that belongs to Robin Masters, who never appears in any show. They're always expecting him to come, but he never comes. Robin Masters. He owns the estate. Higgins manages the estate. And yet, Higgins always says he's scared to death of Robin Masters that he'll come and probably fire him because things are
happening in the estate. And yet, he never gets fired. And he does outlandish things in that estate. For one thing, he lets Tom Selleck, Magnum, live in the estate, free of charge, in an apartment, upstairs, downstairs, refrigerator, everything. Whole apartment. He gets to stay there, free. He gets to drive Robin Masters' Ferrari. You know what a Ferrari costs? About $280,000. It gets wrecked about every third episode. Magnum P.I. gets to drive that Ferrari around. And
then there's these huge Doberman dogs running around the yard all the time, tearing it up. And then there's people that come in with Uzi machine guns and spray it several times. There are garden parties that Higgins puts on for the art society in that huge Robin Masters estate. And I told my wife in the very beginning, I don't buy the storyline. I think Higgins himself is Robin Masters, the way he's acting. He's acting first like he's
scared of Robin Masters, and yet he's giving the estate away. And the only way he could do it is if he was a very good friend of Robin Masters. But he denies that. And as you know, the last episode, before it went off the air, the last line of the last episode was the wedding scene, and Higgins is standing there with Tom Selleck, and Tom Selleck's last line to Higgins is, Higgins, I've been meaning to ask
you a question. And this is it. Are you Robin Masters? Well, of course he was. He was Robin Masters. Now listen, folks. You are not Jesus Christ. In fact, the most dangerous youth workers in the world are the youth workers who think they're Jesus Christ. A youth worker who develops a messiah complex is the most dangerous person there is. The person that thinks they have to generate God's love, they're the most dangerous. The person who perceives
himself as innocent is the most dangerous person. That's the great thing about knowing your sinfulness. You're not Jesus Christ. You never are expected to be Jesus Christ. You're just a very good friend, and that's better. It's better to be his friend. That's what this text says. And when you're his friend, you can give away the best treasure in the estate. And you and I, as pastors and Christian workers and lay workers with youth, we have that
that we get to do. And interestingly enough, it proves our friendship with him. I love the Eugene Peterson Lord's Prayer that we just did. But it's interesting that Martin Luther in his commentary in the Sermon on the Mount, when he comments on the Lord's Prayer, he wonders and muses over the fact that Jesus ties the forgiveness of our sins to our forgiving others. He does it in the P.S. at the end of the Lord's Prayer,
too. And Luther, reflecting on that, says, why that? And he makes this marvelous comment. He says, our Lord ties our forgiving others to our own being forgiven, not in order to threaten us, but in order to assure us. Martin Luther. To assure us of our forgiveness, how are you assured of your forgiveness when you're able to forgive? How are you assured of your love when the love begins to flow through you? And finally, the last proof
on our side is the antiphonal side of Christ taking us into his confidence. It's interesting, in this passage, our Lord invites us to pray to him. Now, here the two of you asked nothing in my name. Now, ask. We get to take him into our confidence. We get to argue with him. We get to pray. We get to bring our requests to the Lord, and that's the proof also of the friendship. Amen. Heavenly Father, we just
prayed your prayer, and we thank you that in that prayer, as we ask for forgiveness, we're able also to humbly ask that you allow your forgiveness to flow through us to the world around us. And Father, we thank you that in this great text, as our Lord has shown us his love, a love that has its source in your love, a love for us, a love that flows into us through our Lord Jesus Christ, through his
death and resurrection, we discover your love. And Father, we're thankful that love is the best treasure in the house that we get to share. Thank you, Lord, for that. Now, bless us in Christ's name, we pray. Amen. So this is the only time we meet together as a full group. There are just a few announcements before we accept. You know, I think I'm going to ask that we pass the piece as we are, before we are
already out, pass the piece to the folks in the row so that we have a chance to really connect here as a full group before we split up for the day. Some of the things that you need to know are, tonight, for the round of this week, we'll be after some horse work. We're going to have the evening so that we can have a play afternoon to ourselves. The round table will be made two decisions first.
If you want to sit together as a round table, as a banquet tomorrow morning, you need to get that information to A so that you can reserve a table for that round table. That's one decision. The second decision is, each round table has the opportunity to choose somebody who will share something at tomorrow and close the workshop, and if you would put your guys' names there, that would be really good. Some people are, really because of
the schedule, and as Amy Phillips said, the idea is, get grown-ups. You know, go ahead. You can't invent something for yourself. You can't invent little workshops for yourself. So that's hard enough. You take your time, and you need to put yourself back together all at the same time. If you have questions about the Presbyterian History Network, there's two questions. Let's see here. I understand there are several people who are here who are writing questions about
the Presbyterian History Network. Is everybody here? Okay. We've got 10 minutes. Yes. If you have questions, these might be people that you can go to for more information about Matthew who will try to get you together to send us some materials tomorrow. The Presbyterian History Network usually gets kind of filtered through this body informally because you often have people from the local who are part of the group. That can happen with this particular one, so we're
working on their ability to knowledge. So, those of you who have questions, go to those folks, and you'll get all the answers you need to get in there. There will be a walking tour on campus. It's 3:30. We need a steward for the middle of the year. A town. A town. A town. ... We'll end it on the streets.
We'll end it on the streets. Those of you who want to play basketball, run over to the canary juice, go to the library, face the front steps of the library, there are two blocks left. We've only got ten minutes. Fine, good, and narrow. Go see our question about the certificate program. We'll talk a little bit about that. I would like to say a few words for our nine o'clock event. It means all of us will
be here. Go to your seats, and pass it to one of the judges before we leave.