190526 Sermon on John 16:23-33 (Easter 6) May 26, 2019

190526 Sermon on John 16:23-33 (Easter 6) May 26, 2019

In our Gospel reading Jesus says, “Whatever you ask the Father in my name he will give it to you.”  Immediately we assume that that can’t be true.  What if I asked for this?  What if I asked for that?  There are dozens of things that we don’t think God would give us.  Maybe our interpretation of this verse is mistaken.

But there are other statements from Jesus that back it up.  In Matthew 7 and Luke 9 you have those familiar words: “Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you shall find, knock and the door shall be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives and whoever seeks finds and to him who knocks the door shall be opened.”  Jesus doesn’t place any conditions on what you can and cannot ask for.  Ask, seek, knock, and it will be given to you.

During Holy Week Jesus cursed a fig tree that did not have any figs on it (because it was not the season for figs) and it withered.  His disciples were astonished at this and Jesus answered them, “Truly, I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what was done to the fig tree, but also if you say to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’ it will be done.  And whatever things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive.” 

And so when Jesus says, “Whatever you ask the Father in my name he will give it to you,” this is not out of keeping with what he says elsewhere.

What, then, can these words mean?  First let’s talk about how these words sound to our reason.  It sounds like what Jesus is giving to us is a wishing well or a blank check or a magic word.  Instead of abracadabra all we need to say is “in Jesus’ name,” and poof our wishes are granted.  There is quite a bit of fictional literature that has been written with wishes being granted as the subject of it.  That’s because it is interesting to think about what you might wish for.

So what would you wish for?  Money, good looks, power, good health.  These are the more respectable kinds of things that people are allowed to say out loud.  There are other answers too, though.  Maybe there’s someone that you’d like to have put in his or her place.  Maybe there’s someone that you’d like to have removed from the land of the living.  And there’s the liquor store and the porn shop and that person that you would like to have sexually.

Nobody has to teach us this way of thinking where we want whatever our desires might be to be fulfilled.  It is already present in the new-born baby.  Babies are very selfish creatures.  They want everything to be just so, and if it isn’t just so, they are going to let you know about it.  Little children continue on this path.  They want to have whatever they want and they will just take what they want out of the hands of whoever happens to be holding it.  It is a lot of work to teach children how to share.  Nobody likes sharing.  It is a curbing of our will, and we want to be able to do whatever we want to do.

Would we be happier if we could do whatever we want to do?  The answer is absolutely not.  Children whose wills are not curbed by parents and other authorities turn out to be miserable wretches.  They get hooked on this and that and nobody wants to be around them because they only live for themselves.  They can’t hold down jobs and often end up in prisons.

We can also see this great unhappiness with the countless stories of people who have won the lottery.  God save each and every one of you from winning the lottery.  The reason why people play the lottery is because they think that it will make their wishes come true.  They will finally have the power to impose their will that is so often hampered otherwise by a lack of resources.  But the wishing is always better than the getting.  It’s not uncommon at all that lottery winners end up divorced, without any real friends, and sometimes they even manage to lose all the millions and millions of dollars that they had won.

So when we hear Jesus say that whatever we ask the Father for in Jesus’s name, that this will be given to us, and our reason immediately kicks in and wonders whether we have won the lottery, but then thinks that that is too good to be true, we have to realize how off base our reason is.  To doubt Jesus’s words because we don’t think that he will give us whatever we want, and therefore dismiss his words are untrue, is foolish.

In the context of one of the passages about prayer that I mentioned at the start of this sermon Jesus asks a rhetorical question: “Which of you, if your son were to ask for a fish, would give him a scorpion instead?”  God giving us everything that we wanted in this life would not make us happier.  We would be less happy.  And then we would go to hell to boot.  If that isn’t a scorpion instead of a fish, then I don’t know what is!—and we shouldn’t expect our heavenly Father to give us poison.

Our greatest needs are not that we should have more power or more money or more pleasure or more comfort or better health.  Our greatest need is to be forgiven and made righteous before God.  We are all sick to death with the evil heart that we have had since before we were babies and that we would still like to have as the driving force in our life.  We have to be saved from these evil desires—not to have them grow all the stronger.

And so what Jesus’s words mean about asking the Father in his name is that our heavenly Father wishes for us to have bread that gives us life instead of scorpions that give us poison.  We are prone to think that Jesus’s words must be false, because we can think of all kinds of things that we don’t think that God would give us.  But we must fight against that impulse.  It is foolish to think that way because God does not love death and destruction, but life.  Just because God might not give us things that we would like to use to kill ourselves either physically or spiritually or both, does not mean that Jesus’s words aren’t true.  Jesus isn’t a liar like us or like the devil.  Whatever Jesus says you can be sure that it is completely true.  Therefore it is true when he says that whatever we ask in his name the Father will give us.

Now I don’t want to give the wrong impression: the good things that God gives us will certainly include many and very abundant earthly blessings.  But these are not the main thing or the most important thing.  What would it profit a man if he were even to be given the entire world with all of its riches so that nobody else even had a red cent but he were to lose his soul?  It would all be for naught.  Mountains of cash are more likely to come from the prince of this world rather than our heavenly Father who has prepared an inheritance for us that is not of this world. 

Part and parcel of God giving us the true riches that thieves cannot steal and moths cannot destroy is even a decrease in our outward quality of life.  For what can it possibly mean to bear a cross than that our will is going to be hampered and thwarted?  The cross is death to the old Adam, but it is good that he should die.  For it is either his evil spirit that will drive our actions or the Lord and Giver of life—the Holy Spirit—who will work life in our mortal bodies.

When we think, therefore, about the good things that we might wish for in Jesus’s name, we should think of what is really needed and necessary.  To learn what these are we have been given the Lord’s Prayer.  One time the disciples said to Jesus, “Teach us to pray.”  The Lord’s Prayer was Jesus’s response.  The things that are asked for in this prayer are very much weighted towards spiritual goods rather than earthly goods. 

With these petitions we pray that the Word of God be taught in its truth and purity and that we as children of God would lead holy lives according to it.  It is a prayer that we would be given the Holy Spirit so that we can believe that pure and true Word and live in a godly way.  It is a prayer that the Father’s will be done rather than my will or the devil’s will or the world’s will.  Even the petition where we ask for daily bread—which includes everything that is necessary to support this body and life—we are only asking for the day, and so we are not so much asking God for mountains of cash, but that we should be thankful and content.  We ask that God would not look at our sins or deny our prayer because of them, but that he would deal with us by grace, and that we may be gracious to those who sin against us.  We pray that we are not led into temptation and delivered from every evil of body and soul, possessions and reputation, and that when our last hour comes he would take us from this valley of sorrow to himself in heaven.

What we are asking for in the Lord’s Prayer is good and wholesome bread that nourishes, strengthens, and gives life, rather than poison.  None of us are going to be disappointed when God’s work with us is done and we are sanctified in heaven with hearts that no longer have any sin.  At that time, if we are able to look back at the way that we thought while we lived this life, we will see how stupid and foolish and evil our petty lusts and desires were—even if those desires were that we should be the richest, smartest, most beautiful person on the planet.  A clean heart and a right spirit is so much better than these things and they are harder to attain—after all, it took the very blood of God to bring it about.  In comparison to the blood bought redemption of Jesus it is as though we are asking for garbage and excrement when we are looking to have our fleshly desires fulfilled.

And so with all boldness and confidence we should come before our heavenly Father as dear children ask their dear father.  You have that astounding ability.  Notice in our reading how Jesus says that he will not ask the Father on our behalf.  The Father himself loves you, because you have believed that Jesus has come from him, and what Jesus has done was so that you could be reconciled to the Father, and you have loved Jesus.  Therefore, the Father himself loves you.  This was not because you were a good boy or girl.  It is because the Father sent his Son.  You did not choose him, but he chose you, and saw to it that you should hear of the Savior, be baptized, and by the power of the Holy Spirit believe that what God says and promises is true.

Just as we are prone to believe that it can’t be true that the Father should give us whatever we ask in Jesus’s name because it doesn’t seem possible, so also it doesn’t seem possible that we should really be loved by God.  With all our foul sins and all our broken promises of reform, we are laid low with a heavy burden of guilt.  We are in need of the kind encouragement that Jesus gives us in our reading.  You have been forgiven of all your sins and God does not hold them to your account because Jesus was punished in your place.  You have the status of a child of God and therefore also access to the Creator of the universe.  This amazing ability is infinitely greater than winning the lottery or tossing a mountain into the sea. 

Do not tread the blood of Jesus underfoot by not believing that your forgiveness is full and complete and that he has made you a child of God.  Perhaps we might pray that God would help us to believe this in the midst of our sins and misery—that our joy would be full.  We have sorrow now, but when we see Jesus we will rejoice and nobody will take our joy from us.