The Father and I are One - John 10: 22-31

At that time the festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” Jesus answered, “I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father's name testify to me; but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father's hand. The Father and I are one.”

The Jews took up stones again to stone him.

Commentary

When I was in grade school, my mother subscribed to the New Yorker magazine. It has always been know for its cartoons, and that is the only part of the magazine I ever looked at. But I always scanned the magazines cover to cover as soon as they arrived to see the cartoons. I still remember one that had a particular resonance with me. It is a picture of a scientist in lab coat, lecturing a whole room full of other scientists in lab coats. Behind the lecturer, at the front of the room is a wall to wall, floor to ceiling, white board, and the lecturer has filled the entire available space with equations. Finally, he stops at the far right, far bottom corner, and announces, “Then a miracle happens”.

I was discussing this with my wife. She helped me realize that there are two types of people in the world with regard to miracles. Some of us, if we know we are dealing with a miracle, would rather pass on the wall full of equations. Some of us, like the scientists in this cartoon, want to go through all the gory details anyway. Those people want to understand as much as they possibly can so they can appreciate the wonder of what we DO know.

When I read today's lesson, the line that stood out for me was “I and my Father are one.” If we do not have the faith to just accept that as fact, what are we to do with it? Here's were the board filled with equations comes in.

“I and my Father are one”. I will assume that for Jesus, “my Father” and God are equivalent concepts. So, I will rework that statement as “God and I are one”. How can that be. I believe Jesus was flesh and blood. He was made from the dust of the earth and will return to the dust of the earth. At least in his material form. So what about God? I do not believe that God has a material form. God is pure spirit. But I also conceive God as the creator of the universe.

In that case, how is that a being of pure spirit can create a material universe?

Believe it or not, astro-physicists are trying to answer this exact question. They don't use the word God of course, but they are trying to figure out where the universe came from. They have learned a great deal that should be exciting to us if we want to know what our father has done for a living.

Scientists have shown that the universe as we know it was not always as it is today. It came into being at a particular point in time and at a particular point in space. We know that stars came before planets, and planets came before oceans, and oceans came before life, and life evolved from single cell organisms for a very long time before man showed up. Taking the time sequence the other way, we also know that clouds of dust came before stars, and before clouds of dust there was only pure energy. We also know that all that pure energy came from a single point. That is as far as science has been able to go. We do not know where the energy came from, or what held it together, or what caused it to disburse. I think that is evidence of God at work. Scientists do not like that conclusion because they can not prove it. I think that it is a benefit I have as a citizen in the 21st century. I have available to me a more complete understanding of God than anyone at any prior time in history.

But where does that leave me. I see God as spirit, with a plan, and the ability to control and direct unimaginable amounts of energy. From looking at the creatures in God's universe, I also conclude that a large part of God's spirit is love.

So what about Jesus? We know that Jesus was a man like us. Hence he was matter. Einstein proved that energy is equal to mass times the square of the speed of light. The equation goes both ways. In other words, mass can be turned into energy, ala the atomic bomb, and energy can be turned into mass, ala creation. In other words, Jesus, and all the rest of us are quite literally the sons and daughters of God since we are all the product of the energy God released in the original moment of creation.

We also know from the bible that Jesus was not the only one to have created miracles. Since we know that matter is just energy, it is certainly possible that the energy of one person could effect matter outside that persons direct control. Hence miracles. We don't know how that happens, but there is nothing in physics that makes it impossible.

All that is left is for God to choose to share some or all of His knowledge with another spirit, and we have the Son of God with a capital S.

For me, this is the reality Jesus is proclaiming with the simple statement, “My Father and I are one”.

So now the real question is, so what? Why not just accept it all as a mystery from the start and let it go at that? For me, the answer is what about all those people who have not been taught from birth that Jesus is the Son of God. What if all you know is that God is the creator and Jesus is a man? That is the situation the Jews at the time found themselves in, and they took up stones again to stone him. Can you blame them? And what about all those people in 2022 who have not been taught from birth that Jesus is the Son of God? In fact, in their case they may not even have been taught that there is a God! And for them the mere existence of Jesus is hearsay! How can we criticize such people if they do not believe Jesus when he says “My Father and I are one”?

Yet Jesus commands us to take His good news to the nations. How do we do that? I do not know the answer to that question. But I suggest that we improve our chances if we embrace what science has discovered about God's creation, and embrace scientists as the fellow truth seekers that they are.

Amen.