John 19.31–37
A sermon preached at St Barnabas’s Church Leederville on Good Friday 18 April, 2025
I want to ask the question, this Good Friday 2025, how it could be that a man executed for blasphemy in April A.D. 30 could by the end of the first-century have become the object of worship through much of the known world.
I’m told you have been studying the Gospel of John. Last week’s reading at the church I go to was from John 12; perhaps you had the same reading. It starts with the Palm Sunday incident where Jesus entered Jerusalem and was greeted as the promised king by excited crowds. His opponents are at their wits end: despite everything they have done to limit Jesus’ influence—and remember, he is a wanted man with a dead or alive notice out for him—now he is coming into Jerusalem and being hailed as a king. John records their frustration: “You see this is getting us nowhere,” they say. “Look, the whole world has gone after him.” It hadn’t actually. It was just a crowd of excited Jews, and within a week Many would have abandoned him and he would be dead. But to John, looking back on it sixty years later, when he lived then in Ephesus in modern day Turkey, it seems like the whole world had gone after him. He had become known and worshipped in Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, North Africa, Spain, Italy, Dalmatia (Albania), Greece and as far away as Briton and India. How did it happen?
There was no colonizing power forcing Christianity on unwilling people— Rome tried to destroy it. There were no wealthy financial backers; no George Soros, no Arab oil money. Nor was there anything like an international scientific movement, nor a powerful media organization. The Christians of the first century were ordinary people, mostly nobodies, armed only with what they called “the gospel,” an extraordinary announcement they said was from God, accompanied by an account of recent extraordinary events. In answer to his promise to send Israel a king, God had sent Jesus, given him miracle-working power, and when his people killed him, had raised him from death and appointed him to the place of highest power in the universe. Jesus is now the King of kings and Lord of lords. He reigns as God’s right-hand man to bring the rebel world to order, and will return when his job is complete, to rescue his followers, raise the dead and judge them, and heal the world of all its ills. Then will rule for ever.
Now you have to ask yourself how people could have believed this, especially considering that this Jesus was executed by crucifixion by order of the Jewish Supreme Court and the Roman provincial authority. I mean, it doesn’t cut much ice today. This week I paused to watch a quiz show on TV when I heard the compere say the next round of questions would be about Easter. One question was about Passover and the fact that the eastern and western church celebrate Easter on different dates. The compere made a facetious comment like, “It makes you wonder whether it wasn’t all made up.” Everyone laughed. But how does the exact date of Jesus’ death affect its reality?[1] I was sad. It is typical of the modern world that it doesn’t take Christianity seriously and doesn’t care. It’s all myths and fairy tales from long ago. Aboriginal smoking ceremonies to drive away the evil spirits—that, of course, we must take very seriously, but not Christianity. So, what made it believable back then?
One difference is that Jesus’ death and resurrection were recent events. But still—what made it believable even a hundred years later. The answer is that in addition to the astounding claim—that Jesus is alive and Lord of the Universe—there were witnesses. Christianity wasn’t a new idea, or a philosophy, or a moral formula, or a supportive community, though all of these things came out of it; it was about something that had happened that had huge implications. It was and is history, events, and events to be believed require witnesses.
John was one such witness who told the story as he experienced it. He was one of the geniuses of the early church, but that is beside the point. He saw things that bewildered him at first, but in the end convinced him he had lived through the most incredible set of events that had ever happened, which needed to be shared with the rest of the world, because they meant that a new age had dawned and a door had been opened to eternal life. The contempt which I heard the other night, which, of course, was heard by millions of others, causes them not to take it seriously, and that is tragic, because unless they believe, they will miss out on eternal life.
I would like you sometime this Easter to sit down with the Gospel of John and read it through. It doesn’t take that long. Does it sound like a fairy tale? True or false, should it be laughed off? Take a pencil, and mark every time you come across the word “witness” or “testimony.” It’s the same word in Greek (marturia). Clearly, John is concerned about witness and the truth of what he is telling. Ask yourself whether you think his witness is credible. The Gospel begins with the testimony (witness) of John the Baptist, and ends with the witness of those who knew the author, and knew he was telling the truth. The whole Gospel is the testimony or witness of John himself.
I was with Martin Ricquebourg the other day and knew he was to preach at Trinity Theological College this week. I asked him what he was going to say. He intended to reflect on John’s description of Jesus’ crucifixion; how after Jesus died a soldier speared him in the side and blood and water gushed out. He was wondering why John made so much of it.
Listen to how John writes:
Since it was the day of Preparation, and so that the bodies would not remain on the cross on the Sabbath (for that Sabbath was a high day), the Jews asked Pilate that their legs might be broken and that they might be taken away. So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first, and of the other who had been crucified with him. But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water. He who saw it has borne witness— his testimony is true [that word twice], and he knows that he is telling the truth— that you also may believe. For these things took place that the Scripture might be fulfilled: “Not one of his bones will be broken.” And again another Scripture says, “They will look on him whom they have pierced.”[2]
At the end here he links it to the words of Zechariah the prophet:
And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy, so that, when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn son.[3]
John was standing near the cross, and it was this that shook him—not the horror, but its significance. What was unfolding before his eyes was just what the Scriptures had foretold, and part of the future yet to unfold for his people. He was writing at a time when the Gentile world was turning to Jesus in large numbers, but his own Jewish people had by and large turned their backs. Perhaps he was looking forward to a day when things would be different.
I am grateful to Martin for this lead, and I want to add another thought. There is an obscure passage in John’s first letter which speaks of witness and water and blood, and I wonder could John be thinking of that moment Jesus was speared.
Speaking of Jesus, he says,
This is he who came by water and blood—Jesus Christ; not by the water only but by the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. For there are three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood; and these three agree.[4]
First, notice the word “witness” or “testify” occurs twice (and six more times in the short passage that follows). But he is not talking about his own testimony, but the witness of the water and the blood and the Spirit. What he means, I think, is that Jesus’ life (that is the water), and his death (the blood) are witnesses to the fact that he is the Son of God and that his promise of eternal life is real.
First the water. Early in the Gospel a Jewish leader named Nicodemus comes to Jesus, and Jesus tells him he must be born again. Nicodemus is surprised; he is a scholar but has never heard this. He asks whether it is possible to enter his mother’s womb and be born again. Jesus replies, “Except a person is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” To be born of water means to be born in the natural way from the womb, when there is a flood of water from the mother’s amniotic sack. “That which is born of the flesh is flesh,” says Jesus; “that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not me surprised that I say you must be born again.”[5]
This is why I think the first witness John mentions in his letter, the water, refers to Jesus’ natural life—the flesh. One of the chief means used by the early Christians to convince people of the reality of salvation was the story of Jesus’ life. At least four of them wrote accounts which they called “Gospels.” If you study the life of Jesus there is enough to convince you he spoke the truth when he said he came from God. Jesus’ life bears witness to who he is.
But in addition to his life, there is his death, the blood. It was horrible. He was flogged, made to carry the horizonal beam of his cross through the city, mocked, stripped naked, laid out, iron spikes were driven through his wrists, he was hoisted up, his feet attached to the upright, and there he hung, a spectacle of filth and urine and flies, until his death. At any time he could have called on his Father to rescue him; at any time his Father could have taken pity and saved him. It was not the nails that held him to the cross, but his love for lost mankind. And still today people mock. The whole circumstances of Jesus’ death should assure us he knew what he was doing, and told the truth.
And there is a third witness, says John, a supernatural witness. If it were left to us we would all be mockers, but from the place where he now rules Jesus sends God’s Holy Spirit to open the hearts of lost rebels, so that they understand the gospel and believe.
And so the name of Jesus spread. “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies,” he said, that time when the Greeks were asking after him—“Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies it bears much fruit.” And so it had, and will continue until he comes again. Christianity stands on the credibility of the witnesses, who left us four accounts of Jesus’ life and death. And there is also the witness of the Holy Spirit who works on these testimonies to create faith in our hearts.
As he says in his first letter:
This is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.[6]
[1] The lunar calendar has 360 days in a year, so dates differ from the Julian (solar) reckoning. Actually, there is no certainty whether Jesus died in A.D. 30 or 33, but this doesn’t detract from the truth of the event.
[2] John 19.31–37.
[3] Zechariah 12.10.
[4] 1 John 5.6–7.
[5] John 3.
[6] 1 John 5.11.