John 13:31-38 – The Gospel of John

We will be reading from the Gospel of John, chapter 13, one through to thirty-eight.

John 13 · chapter mention

When he had gone out, Jesus said, Is the Son of Man glorified?

God is glorified in him.

If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and glorify him at once.

Little children, yet a little while I am with you.

You will seek me, and just as I said to the Jews, so now I also say to you, where I am going, you cannot come.

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.

Simon Peter said to him, Lord, where are you going?

Jesus answered him, Where I am going, you cannot follow me.

But you will follow afterwards.

Peter said to him, Lord, why can I not follow you now?

I will lay down my life for you.

Jesus answered, Will you lay down your life for me?

Truly, truly, I say to you, the rooster will not crow till you have denied me three times.

May the Lord bless the reading of his word in Jesus' name.

Amen.

If you are new, uh you are particularly welcome.

My name is Mark.

I'm one of the leaders here at uh City Church.

Please uh open up uh on your phone, or if you've got uh brought a Bible with you, or if you need a Bible, there's a few down here.

It'd be good for you to have John 13, uh that G Day so wonderfully read for us uh in front of you.

Uh we are uh a church that seeks to sit under the authority of uh of the word of God.

We're turning to John 13.

Uh we're picking up uh in verse 31.

John is where we're going to be really until uh the end of April or so.

We're gonna go through uh Easter uh with it.

And so good to be sitting under its authority and making sure that what I'm saying is coming from the from the text.

Uh every once in a while, just every once in a while, uh, we uh we get a uh a very particular sensation.

Uh it's that sensation that uh comes when you uh feel all of the the hairs kind of stand up at the back of your neck.

It's the it's a feeling uh that we call bliss or delight.

Uh it's a moment of uh of unbridled uh self-forgetting joy and wonder.

Do you know the type of sensation that I'm describing?

Uh when you just you lose yourself uh in the moment, uh just uh for that for that fleeting little second music, does it?

Uh I don't know what kind of music you're you're into, uh whether it's the uh the the swell and soar of the uh of the strings if you're a classical music sort of guy, or it's the or it's the beat dropping uh if you're not a classical music sort of person.

Uh it's that moment where you just feels like everything's just come together at once and it's wonderful.

So music does it.

Ask Andrew Woodmartin, who's here, gives a wave, Andrew Warby.

Uh yeah, film does it right?

Phillim is a great medium for helping you feel like you're uh you're losing yourself in the story.

Great writing, uh great character development where you feel empathy, a connection with the people.

You lose yourself for just a couple of hours.

You're in that world.

And not only that, but we leave and we feel like actually our our very hearts, our souls have been spoken to sometimes in uh in subtle ways.

Uh sex can do it too.

Sex gives you that that feeling of bliss, of delight, that that moment of embrace, of utter vulnerability and oneness and self-giving.

Success will do it when you've graduated and you stand there, and there is the applause and adulation, the sense of achievement, like reaching the the summit of a mountain just at the moment where the clouds begin to part and you survey the horizon almost in that 360 panorama, and it feels like your future is is boundless.

There are there are things in our world, there are things in our lives that they almost seem designed to give us this sensation of bliss, of of delight, of losing ourselves in the moment.

And then it's gone.

It ends.

The music stops, the credits roll, the bliss of an embrace cannot last forever.

The applause becomes an echo, and you realize that the mountaintop is a path into another valley.

Pursuing our desires, pursuing bliss feels in this world like chasing rainbows.

That every step you get closer to the rainbow, you feel like it's just moving a little bit from you.

And and when you enter into that sensation, when you when you feel like you've grasped it, when you enter into that dance, it immediately flees from you again.

Could it be that the reasons why these things flee from us is because they're just shadows?

Could it be that the reason why these sensations are temporary is because they're just pointing to something else?

They're a projection of a greater glory, a more substantive, a more weighty bliss and delight.

We chase them because we need them.

They speak to something deep within us.

But is that how we're made to chase rainbows?

Are we made to be eternally frustrated?

That we get it for a moment and then it's gone again?

Are we doomed to live in a kind of shadow land?

We chase these things and are moved by them because you and I, every person in this room, is not just a material being.

There is more to this world than just the flesh and blood and matter of the cosmos.

We are made for and live in more than just a material universe.

We are, by nature, bliss and delight detectors.

We want it.

We're like bloodhounds for it.

We smell it out and we pursue it in our lives.

It sets the course and trajectory of our being.

Or to use the language of Christianity, to use the language of the Bible, you might say, that we're hardwired for glory.

Because that's what bliss and delight is.

It's to behold something that is glorious, majestic, and beautiful, and to be captivated by it.

The reason why we chase after the shadows of uh of music or of success or of losing ourselves in film or or sex is because we're hardwired for glory.

We look for those things, those people, those experiences and those sensations because they they harmonize with something deeper.

And so we chase our shadows.

We grasp on to the ever-slipping sand of satisfaction.

C.

S.

Lewis, who wrote the Chronicles of Narnia and uh many other works, say Christian thinker, writer, philosopher.

And he has a very famous quote in his book, a book entitled The Weight of Glory, uh, where he says, We, that is human beings, we are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.

Like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the slums, because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the beach.

We are far too easily pleased.

Lewis's point is not that our desire for glory is too strong, but that it's too weak.

We settle for the shadows, the mud pies.

We settle for the for the shadows of this world, the success and the money, the fame and the sex and the control and the comfort.

Because we cannot get our head around the idea that there might be something more concrete that would satisfy the human soul in a more lasting way.

We cannot fathom the idea that there might be a deeper bliss, that there might be something that is eternally delight provoking and joy stirring.

All of the desires that you feel.

And I don't know where you look for them, where you run to in order to have them fulfilled.

I don't know what shadow you're chasing, what rainbow you're pursuing.

But all of the desires that you feel, all of the things that drive you on, all of the things that make you feel alive, they all point beyond themselves.

They all point to deeper glory.

You're made for glory.

Did you realize that?

All of those drives is you seeking glory.

But it is as though our roadmap is upside down.

We're looking for it in all the wrong places.

We look for it in the shadows.

But the paradox of Christianity is this true glory, not the shadow of it, not the projection or emanation of it, but true glory, the full weighty substance of glory, is found in the place where human beings least want to look.

Let me say that again.

Glory is found in the place where human beings least want to look.

I have two points this morning.

The first is see glory.

Point one.

See glory.

And the reason why I'm kind of camping out on this is because 31 and 32 are confusing.

You read them and you we just kind of skip on past.

What relationship do they have to the rest?

Let's remind ourselves of them.

Now, when he had gone out, who's he?

That's Judas.

Judas has gone out into the night, into that night of ignorance and rebellion and spiritual darkness.

That's what night means in John's gospel.

Judas has gone out into the night, and now Jesus sits with the eleven, with the new community that he is building.

The betrayer has gone.

He's with this new community, and he begins to teach them.

He says, Nah is the Son of Man glorified.

And God is glorified in him.

If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and glorify him at once.

You ever read the Bible and you think, well, it's sometimes sometimes Jesus is a bit kind of zen.

He gives a kind of Confucian riddle.

You think, oh, that's I suppose that's just what Jesus does.

Let's move on to the stuff that's more understandable.

Verses 31 and 31 or 32 are a little bit like that.

They're surprising.

Jesus doesn't say, okay, guys, uh, here's what's going to happen uh in about two hours' time.

Uh I'm going to get arrested.

Uh I'm going to die.

It's going to be sad, uh, but hold on uh to the memories.

No, he doesn't.

He doesn't say that at all.

Judas has gone out and he begins to teach the disciples, and he says, Now, now is the Son of Man glorified.

Son of Man is Jesus' favorite term for himself.

Comes from an Old Testament book called Daniel, from Daniel chapter 7.

Daniel 7 · chapter mention

It is his own name for himself.

And he's saying, Now the Son of Man is glorified.

He's giving the disciples a heads up.

He says, Hey, disciples, we're on the brink of glory time.

Glory is about to happen.

So what is glory?

What does he mean?

Well, glory is a uh is a fairly major theme all the way through John's gospel.

We we picked it up when we did the the first half of the series, but let me remind you, uh, if uh, or indeed if you're new, so it begins, uh we pick it up in uh in chapter one, where John says of the incarnation, that is the coming of Jesus to earth, he says, we have seen his glory.

The glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Or when Jesus turns the water into wine, we read there that the disciples who saw the miracle saw Jesus' glory, that Jesus manifested his glory, and the disciples put their trust in him.

And then in chapter 12, the Gentiles, that is, non-Jews, come to Jesus, that they're looking for him, they want to put their faith in him, and he says, the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.

So, whatever this glory is, it's something quite important in John.

It's been building all the way from the start.

It's coming now.

So glory in John can be summarized in this.

It's not primarily what we give God.

This is important.

Glory in the Bible is not primarily what we give God, but what God reveals to us.

Glory primarily is what God reveals to us.

Glory can be summarized as this.

Glory is the outward shining of God's inward being.

It is the outward shining of who God is.

It is the disclosure, the revelation, the showing to the world of what he's like, his beauty, his holiness, his might, his goodness, his love, his commitment to justice.

And when glory is revealed, we're not in shadow land anymore.

God is inviting us when he reveals his glory to, in a sense, reach out and touch him, to see him with unveiled eyes, to feel the very pulse and heartbeat of who God is.

Glory is the revelation of the character of God.

So the expectation from Jesus' words is that any moment now, Jesus is going to reveal his glory.

Reveal what the father is like, and then the whole world will get to see the glory of God.

Jesus is saying, now, now is the time.

Keep watching.

Watch carefully, disciples.

You're about to see glory.

More than on the mountain, on the Mount of Transfiguration, when my appearance was changed, more than when I turned the water into wine, more than when I resurrected Lazarus.

You're about to see the very heartbeat of the God of the universe.

Now, disciples, keep on watching.

Don't look away, don't miss it.

Now, if you're a disciple sitting there in the upper room, you might think, great.

This is gonna be awesome.

What are we gonna get?

These miracles were pretty cool.

Lots of wine, dead people coming back to life.

Love it.

What could possibly show us more glory than those things?

And then you see it.

Jesus is taken, he is arrested, he is falsely accused, he's mocked, flogged, and finally he is crucified until he is dead.

And Jesus is saying to us this morning, if you watch carefully, you'll see glory.

I told you your maps were upside down.

Where is the glory of God most fully seen?

Where is the character of God disclosed to all of humanity most perfectly?

It's on Good Friday.

It's at the cross of the Lord Jesus.

No wonder people think that Christianity is a stupid religion.

Maybe some of you are here this morning, you've been invited by a friend, and you think that Christianity is a stupid religion.

People have always thought that about Christianity.

It looks at at some level so unsophisticated and foolish.

People sneer at how intellectually primitive it all seems.

Others mock it because it looks so weak.

Gods are supposed to be unassailably powerful.

How could you possibly worship a crucified god?

One of the oldest uh discovered pieces of graffiti is a as a second century drawing uh mocking the crucifixion.

It's a uh it's scrolled on a wall, and uh and Jesus is depicted as having the uh the head of an ass of a donkey.

And the slogan, this is true, in the slogan, uh there's a man bowing down, and the slogan says, Alexa Menos worships his God.

Why would you worship a crucified God?

This is why our glory map is upside down.

We're looking for glory in wisdom, we're looking for glory in prowess, we're looking for glory in power, but God shows his glory in the place where human beings least want to look in weakness, in seeming folly.

The glory of God is supremely revealed at the cross of Jesus.

How is it that God would show us his glory at the cross?

The answer?

In every possible way.

Where do we see God's commitment to justice?

Where do we see his holiness, his moral purity?

The answer?

At the cross of Jesus.

Where do we see the ugliness of sin and God's opposition and hatred of that sin that harms his?

Image bears, it deconstructs us.

Answer at the cross of Jesus.

And where do we see the love of God?

The undeserved grace and kindness of God to sinful people like me and like you.

The answer at the cross of Jesus.

The cross answers one of the great puzzles of the universe.

God is just.

I must be punished.

But if God is also love, then he must welcome me home and call me his son.

How is it that both come together?

They come together at the cross of the Lord Jesus.

That is the place where wrath and mercy meet, sin atone for, and grace abounding to us.

There can be no greater revelation of the character, the beauty, the majesty, the goodness, the justice, the glory of God than that bloody cross on a hill outside of Jerusalem about 2,000 years ago.

So brothers and sisters, friends, Jesus would say to his disciples, glory is about to be revealed.

Keep watching.

And so my encouragement to you is to look at the cross and to see the glory.

Second point.

Actually, before we move on.

Just one other thing just to mention before we do.

If the cross is the supreme revelation of the character of God, if it is the supreme disclosure of what God is like, then it needs to be at the heart of Christian spirituality.

It needs to be at the heart of the church.

It needs to be at the heart of who we are and what we do.

It must be the bedrock of our churches, the drumbeat of our mission.

Because it is the fulcrum around which eternity depends.

To forget the cross and Christians do and churches do, to forget the cross is to become obsessed again with shadow land.

To forget the cross is to become unwilling to look where glory is revealed and to fall in love again with chasing shadows.

If you're a believer here this morning, does the cross captivate you?

Do you look upon it?

Not in the sense of you get some sort of iconography.

But as you contemplate what it is that Jesus has done for you, do you see the glory of God?

Do you see his mercy?

Do you revel in and are moved by his boundless grace to you?

See glory.

We can move on now.

Point two show glory.

See glory, show glory.

Gonna put up a little slide.

If the glory of God is revealed at the cross, then we must have cross-shaped love if we are to reveal God to the world.

Hopefully that's what it says behind me.

It does.

Wonderful.

Just take a moment just to read that again, because that's the this is the link to the rest of the passage.

The glory of God is revealed to the cross, then we must have cross-shaped love.

We'll unpack what that means if we are to reveal God to the world.

Jesus moves, keep that up, please.

Jesus moves from talking about his glory, his departure.

That's what he means by where I'm going.

Um, he goes from talking about these things to then saying he's going to give the disciples a new command.

And so we pick it up in uh uh in verse 34.

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.

Now, this command is strange, insofar as it's not new.

So, what's Jesus on about?

There's commands all over the the Old Testament, and certainly even Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount has been talking about how the law is fulfilled by by love of God and love of neighbor.

There's plenty in the Old Testament law about how love is at the very center of how we ought to relate to one another.

So, in what sense is it new?

Well, I think probably the best understanding is that it's new in terms of quality.

And that comes in the last little phrase, as I have loved you.

Because I'm about to show you how other person-centered loving I am, and you ought to love just like that.

What's new?

It's the quality.

Love how as I have loved you.

That's what we mean by cross-shape love.

That's the kind of love that we must have.

That is the shape that our love must be.

And this love is primarily for one another.

He's talking to disciples, he's talking to the to the to the Christian community, to the only church that's in existence.

And so he's talking to believers, and he's saying the way you ought to relate to one another, Christian to Christian, is cross-shaped love.

You must love one another.

Why?

Because they are a new community.

One of the things that this means is, uh, brother or sister, uh, if you are making City Church your your home, if you're going to journey with us, one of my encouragements would be don't be a spectator.

I know we meet in a cinema, but we're not a cinema.

We're a church family.

We are in the cinema, but not of the cinema.

Ah, you're still awake.

It's hard to know in the darkness.

So don't be a spectator.

Jesus is inviting you to show your love to others.

This little phrase, as I have loved you, also means that love here, and indeed love in Christian thought and philosophy, is not primarily a feeling.

It's an action.

Love uh these days is wrongly seen, I think, as primarily an emotion, a passion, a passion that uh that ebbs and flows, it waxes and winds.

Sometimes you feel like you you love a person and then you fall out of love of the person, and when you don't love them, that's when you well, you know, don't love you anymore.

So then I'm gonna go off and find somebody else to to love.

But actually, love for the last 2,000 years up until about 60 years ago uh was not primarily a passion, not primarily an emotion, it was an action.

It was a commitment to another cross-shaped love, is a love that doesn't just feel, though it is good that there is emotion attached to it.

We we don't just want to be automatons, and indeed we're not.

God has not created us to be, but we act out of love, perhaps even before we feel the emotions connected with love.

And the reason why we love one another is because that love for one another has a kind of evangelistic force, it commends the love of Jesus to the world.

You see that in verse 35?

By this, all people will know that you are my disciples.

How?

If you love one another.

How will the world know that we belong to Jesus and that Jesus is glorious, and that Jesus has cross-shaped love?

How will people know it is in our love for one another?

Tartullian was a Roman historian, uh historian around the uh the around the fourth century, and he was speaking of the Christians.

He was uh writing to the to the emperor, and he's talking about this weird sect uh that was uh that had sprung up and the kind of things that they do, and it's it's all very strange.

They uh they don't just expose the children that they don't want so that they die, they actually go and they adopt other children uh from the from the rubbish heap and they they take them in.

They seem to live in a in a very charitable way.

And he has this very famous phrase, speaking of the Christians, he says, see how they love one another.

See how they love one another.

Or uh in more modern times, there was another Christian thinker, philosopher, a guy called Francis Schaeffer, and he said that the Christian community, our love for one another, is what he called the final apologetic.

What that means is that people explore Christianity, and maybe you're here exploring Christianity, and you've got questions.

There's intellectual questions that need to be answered, and certainly there is plenty of intellectual rigor in Christianity in order to uh to engage with those questions.

But what Schaeffer said was actually the final thing that really commands Christianity to people, the final thing that shows that Christianity is true, it's our love for one another.

Because it's a love that stretches across ages and cultures and ethnicities.

You look around this room, you think of the people who are in your community group.

No social club would throw us all together.

But it is when we love across those things that would normally divide us that we commend the gospel of Jesus to a watching world.

What was the mark of a follower of Jesus in the first century?

Well, it's that they were with him, he was there.

And so to be a follower of Jesus was to associate with him.

But how do we now show the glory of an unseen Savior?

We do it by our love.

Have you realized that?

You realize that in terms of your involvement with a community of faith, that actually when we love one another, when we seek the good of others, it's not just because that's the nice thing that nice Christians do.

No, it is that when we do that, we show the glory of an unseen Savior.

And people see that and they go, look at how much the folks in City Church love one another.

What this means is that Christianity at its core is not actually primarily about right belief.

It's important to have right belief.

I like right belief.

I like the uh the intellectual and philosophical side of Christianity, but that's not what Christianity rests on.

How do we know that?

The devil has right belief.

The devil has great, spotless theology, but he does not have cross-shaped love.

Nor is Christianity around the level of passion or fervency that you feel right now, this moment, or the vivid experience that you had or are longing for.

Our emotions ebb and flow, our experience of God ebbs and flows, our nearness to Him ebbs and flows.

Your faith, indeed, all of Christianity is not founded on your emotional over-under.

It's all about cross-shaped love.

Nor is it about spiritual giftedness.

Some of you might think, well, I don't feel very gifted at all.

That's okay.

Because it's about cross-shaped love.

And that should be really encouraging.

Because you might be sitting here this morning, you think, I don't really know very much about Christianity at all.

I don't know how to explain what I don't know, you know, the evidences for the resurrection, or I couldn't talk to anybody about the Trinity or anything like that.

It doesn't matter.

Because you can love, can you?

You could love somebody else, couldn't you?

You might feel little passion right now.

Maybe you felt little passion for a very long time.

You struggle to feel like God is near to you.

But you can still love.

You can still love.

Or you might think that, as I've just mentioned, that your gifts are not very impressive.

You wish that the Lord had kept the receipt and that you could return it and trade it in for another.

But you can still love.

The basis of Christian spirituality is cross-shaped love for one another.

But this cross-shaped love does not come naturally to us, and here we deal with Peter.

What's Peter doing in this passage?

What does it mean?

You know, there's the there's excuse me, there's three sections, right?

There's the there's the glory bit in verses 31 and 32, there's the new command uh bit and the evangelistic force of that that we've just been looking at, and then and then Peter comes in.

He's like, Oh, well, you know, I'll uh lay down my life.

And say, well, how do you integrate all three of those things?

What's the connection between the fact that we are made to see glory and then the command to love?

Well, the connection there is that uh that actually when we love one another, we show the glory of an unseen savior.

So, what's Peter doing?

What's the next connection?

Well, it's this.

So you need to realize that cross-shaped love, it doesn't come naturally to us.

It's not something that we can muster up from within ourselves.

See, Peter, Peter is almost kind of, he's a human being, but even more so, right?

He's a human being par excellence.

You know, he is the guy who just he he shoots first, he asks questions later, he leads with his head and with all of the bravado and pride, and yes, really just love because there's some stressful things happening, and he loves the Lord Jesus, but he runs at this issue.

He's like, no, like I want to follow you, I'm gonna lay down my life for you.

And Jesus says, Don't be so sure.

Don't be so sure.

Verse 38, will you lay down your life for me?

Truly, truly, I say to you, the rooster will not crow until you have denied me three times.

You cannot die for the good shepherd until the good shepherd has died for you.

You cannot lay down your life for him until he has laid down his life for you.

In a sense, we're back at the feet washing.

But Peter needed to be served by Jesus, he needed to have his feet washed, and he was resistant to that.

Do you remember?

Again, kind of his heart was in the right place, but his his map's upside down.

And just as Peter needed to have his feet washed, so too, he now needs Jesus to lay down his life for him, and so do you.

Jesus says, Don't be too sure, Peter, don't be hasty.

But actually, Jesus' words, and this is going to get picked up again.

We're actually going to see the fulfillment of this, and then at the very end, probably in the very last week of this entire series in April, the Lord Jesus is going to restore Peter.

Because actually, this warning, it's full of mercy, it's full of love.

Jesus offers mercy to the deniers and disowners.

The people who have found themselves in a situation and they love Jesus, they call him his Lord, but the situation that they're in, he just they they shrink back.

I've done that.

I've failed to name my love for the Lord Jesus because I feared what other people will think of me.

Have you done that too?

You disowned and denied him.

You think that's not who I want to be.

There is mercy for the denier, for the disowner.

Cross-shaped love speaks mercy to each of us who have shied away from our allegiance to the Lord Jesus.

And he beckons us back to see his glory once more.

The shadows of glory that this world affords are often good things in and of themselves.

Pleasant things.

But the question is, will you be shaped by them?

Will you be captivated by their beauty?

Or will you look at the cross?

And when you look at the cross, what do you see?

Ask yourself, sitting here in the silence, when you look at the cross of the Lord Jesus, does anything that I have said make sense to you?

Or does it just sound so strange, so weak?

Why would that be glorious?

Or do you look and see the revelation of God's justice, his goodness, his mercy, his majesty, his beauty, his holiness, his grandeur, his grace, and his love?

Only with the eyes of faith can you see that.

That's the thing.

Cross-shaped love does not come naturally to us because seeing the glory of the cross doesn't come naturally to us.

It's something that can only be granted to us by faith.

And so the invitation this morning has to be that if you look at the cross and you cannot see glory, it's to come to Jesus in repentance and faith and say, Give me new eyes.

I don't want my upside down mount.

I don't want to chase the shadows anymore.

I want to see your glory.

And for all who see it.

We get to reflect that glory to the world.

That's both daunting and wonderful, isn't it?

We get to show the glory of an unseen savior.

Not in grand displays of power or great production values, but in the simple acts of kindness.

In the unity that we have one with another.

In displays of mercy, that is cross-shaped love.

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