I’ve been reading some bad news about what is happening to Christians in Iran in the wake of the current political unrest. “Pressure on Iranian Christians is growing just as foreign powers are being blamed for rioting that broke out due to the electoral fraud. The argument on the influence of foreign powers is well known to Iranian Christians.” It’s a wonder there are any Christians left in Iran!
Another news story is the treatment of Christians in Pakistan. This had been reported in our own national press earlier this month.
Killing and burning up people with whom you disagree reminds me of a couple of Jesus’ extremist followers who wanted to do the same. In Mark 3:17 Jesus named this potential murder squad as the “Sons of Thunder,” Although traditionally known down through history as “the Apostle of Love” John wasn’t always like that.
In Luke 9:51-56, I read of these two extremists who want to incinerate a whole community who had offended them! We have people today who want to blow people up with explosives because they don’t believe as they do. Luke 9:51-56 tells me that Jesus had two such followers in James and John:
“As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem. And he sent messengers on ahead, who went into a Samaritan village to get things ready for him; but the people there did not welcome him, because he was heading for Jerusalem. When the disciples James and John saw this, they asked, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?” But Jesus turned and rebuked them, and they went to another village.”Jesus had passed through Samaria about two years previously. In John 4 we read the story of Jesus talking to a Samaritan woman and eventually the whole village responded to his teaching. This must have been a different Samaritan village but the fact that Jesus only wanted to stay the night in the village, and then go on to Jerusalem the next day, seemed to have insulted the Samaritans.
There was intense hostility between the Samaritans and the Jews because of their different places of worship: they vied with each other over their temples and their mountains. The Jews worshipped in the Temple at Jerusalem - the Samaritans worshipped in their temple on Mount Gerazim. What a cheek that these Jewish travelers should come along and ask for “Bed and Breakfast” before journeying on to Jerusalem!
So the people in this particular village said, “Get lost!” That was bad news! Refusing hospitality was a serious thing. James and John got angry and they thought Jesus would be angry too. “Do you want us to call fire down from heaven and destroy them?” they asked. Verse 55 tells us, “But Jesus turned and rebuked them and they went on to another village”.
Jesus’ ministry was one of reconciliation between God and mankind. If there was any dying to do it would be Jesus who would do it. Jesus came to offer hands of friendship to people who were even His enemies. In this case, His friendship was slighted through religious bigotry, both on the part of the Samaritans and on the part of the Jews. For each, God could only be worshipped on their mountain!
For John, the Samaritans were enemies of Israel, and its God. They should be destroyed there and then, by fire and brimstone! That was John as one of the “Sons of Thunder.” Down through history the Apostle John has been known as the Apostle of love. Just read 1 John 4:7-21. How John changed!
I have often pondered a hypothetical situation with the Apostle John meeting up with some of those Samaritan villagers in the new kingdom? In Acts 8 we are told that Samaria really woke up to the preaching of the Gospel after Pentecost. Can you imagine John talking with someone in the new Kingdom? “And what part of the old world did you come from? ” he might ask. “From Israel” comes the reply. “From Israel” says John, “Why, I am from Israel, too”. “What part?” Then the name of a little village up in Samaria is given. John ponders - thinks he remembers where that was - then he stops . . . he does remember. He is not sure what to say. He is embarrassed. It was the very village he would have had destroyed and burned to ashes! All those men! All those women! All those children!
So what is it that changed John that we find so different about him in his Gospel and his epistles! This is not the “Son of Thunder”. This is a transformed John. We see he has come to know God in a way he had not known Him before. Notice what we read in 1 John 3:1 “Behold what manner of love the Father has lavished on us that we may be called the children of God! And that is what we are.” We read in 1 John 3:11-24 that anyone who hates others is not of God. So, when John spoke about this “manner of love” the Father has lavished on us, it is quite extraordinary - he wasn’t deserving of that love. But God’s love is not the kind of love that responds spontaneously to someone who is obviously very attractive or beautiful character-wise. John was certainly not that way in his early years. John was the disciple Jesus loved, despite what he was! It was Jesus who named James and John the “Sons of Thunder”!
When John is asking his readers to “Behold what manner of love the Father has lavished on us,” he is marveling that God should love us at all! The Gospels don’t say that Jesus waits for us to make some agreement with Him before He invested His life in ours - that when we become good enough he will take us on board as members of his kingdom. The Bible says, “God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). That is God’s love - Completely selfless. As Charles Wesley wrote in one of his many hymns, “Amazing love, how can it be that Thou my God should die for me.” Maybe Richard Dawkins has not come across this but God shows us this love even when we have even been hostile to Him. As He expressed 2000 years ago when hung on a cross, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing”! (Luke 23:34).
So how did John eventually change from being a ‘Son of Thunder’ to becoming the Apostle of Love? How did he become an inclusive and generous hearted person? In his Gospel, in John 3:5-8 he writes of Jesus describing this new experience as being “born again” by the Holy Spirit. In 2 Corinthians 5:17 the Apostle Paul says that “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, the old has gone; the new has come.”
That is what brought about the change in the Apostle John. This change of heart is what God does, and what science can’t do. Reason and science can make life easier - but it can also make life more difficult! It can certainly create carnage with more sophisticated weapons to kill or maim. It can spend billions on creating better surveillance and protection and security systems and build more secure prisons to lock up society’s dissidents, - but what science can’t do is change the human heart so there would be no need of these things in the first place! Any objective view of history and a good look at the times in which we live we can’t say that science has made us a better and safer world in which to live! As the atheist Matthew Paris remarks on his view of Christianity in Africa, “Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.” And that must be good for the world too!
The Christian message is a challenge to human behaviour. What about our attitude towards others who don’t see things as we do? What about our attitude towards people in other belief systems - or even in our own families? That confrontation in that Samaritan village has been repeated over and over again down through history, and someway or another we have all been part of the hostilities of this world against God. Jesus faced the painful death on a cross because of our hostility. What price is God’s love!
Today, the Christian message is that God still holds out His friendly hand to both the ‘Johns’ and to the ‘Samaritans’ of our day, whether it is in Iran or Pakistan or within communities and families here in the UK or elsewhere in our world. That kind of love the Bible talks about still changes lives as it did back in Jesus’ day. That is what the Bible calls “the power of the gospel unto salvation”. That is the Good News! But it has to be accepted. That is why these words from John still call for our attention today - “Behold, what manner of love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called the children of God.”
There was to be no murder squads among Jesus followers in His day - or in ours! It was by beholding Jesus that John became changed and became the Apostle of Love. It is by beholding Jesus that we become changed. It is Jesus who is life-giving and life-changing. Said Jesus, “I am the way the truth and the life” (John 14:6). Seeing our hostile and violent world in which we live we surely must say, His way is the better way, isn’t it?
