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READINGS
John Chapter 1:19-28
And this is the witness of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites that they might ask him, Who are you? (20) And he acknowledged and did not deny; yea, he acknowledged, I am not the Christ. (21) And they asked him, What, then? Are you Elijah? And he said, I am not. Are you the Prophet? And he answered, No. (22) Then they said to him, Who are you, that we may give an answer to those sending us? What do you say about yourself? (23) He said, “I am a voice crying in the wilderness:” “Make straight” “the way of the Lord,” as Isaiah the prophet said. Isa. 40:3 (24) And those who had been sent were of the Pharisees. (25) And they asked him and said to him, Why then do you baptize, if you are not the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet? (26) John answered them, saying, I baptize in water, but One stands in your midst whom you do not know; (27) This One it is who has come after me, who has been before me, of whom I am not worthy that I should loose the thong of His sandal. (28) These things took place in Bethabara beyond the Jordan, where John was baptizing.
True Christian Religion #690 by Emanuel Swedenborg
The baptism performed by John represented the cleansing of the external man; but baptism as practised among Christians at the present time represents the cleansing of the internal man, which is his regeneration. That is why we read that John baptised with water, but the Lord baptises with the Holy Spirit and with fire. So too John’s baptism is called a baptism of repentance (Matt. 3:11; Mark 1:4ff; Luke 3:3, 16; John 1:25, 26, 33; Acts 1:22; 10:37; 18:25). The Jews who were baptised were nothing but external men, and the external man cannot become internal without faith in Christ. It may be seen in the Acts of the Apostles (19:3-6) that those who received John’s baptism became internal men, when they accepted faith in Christ and were then baptised in the name of Jesus.
Apocalypse Revealed #378 by Emanuel Swedenborg
…what was signified by baptism in the Jordan by John (Matt. iii; Mark i 4-13), and what was signified by these words of John concerning the Lord:-
That He would baptise with the Holy Spirit and with fire Luke iii 16; John i 33;
and concerning himself:-
That he would baptise with water John i 26.
The meaning of this is that the Lord washes or purifies man by Divine Truth and Divine Good, and that John by his baptism represented this; for the ‘Holy Spirit’ is Divine Truth, ‘fire’ is Divine Good, and ‘water’ is a representative of them; for ‘water’ signifies the Truth of the Word, which becomes good by a life in accordance with it
SERMON
As we move further into the gospel of John we need to ensure that we have the foundational elements for thinking about it firmly established in our minds otherwise we will misunderstand what it trying to say and what it applies to. We have looked at a few of these now, but it’s important that we reinforce our learning so that we don’t forget. The first thing to realised from the perspective of Spiritual Christianity is that while much of the Lord’s Word is written in a historical style it is not written to give us a history lesson, rather this style is symbolic and that everything in the Word whether its people, animals, geographical elements, objects are all tools or symbols that represent some aspect of the human mind so that when a story is told it brings together a number of symbols in such a way that once we have the key to reading these symbols were can begin to learn about how our minds function, how our attitudes develop, what these attitudes produce in our life, and how we might overcome those that are destructive of a truly spiritually focused life and promote those things that nurture and support such a life.
This key to opening up the inner meanings found in the Word is provided for us in the teachings for the New Church. The basic principle is this; every natural thing corresponds to something spiritual, or if you like every natural thing mentioned in the Word represents something spiritual within our minds. So if we take this principle and apply it when we come to study the Word, then our interest in it is first and foremost on what this spiritual meaning is and how that applies to our living a spiritual life? The spiritual meaning of the Word is designed for the human spirit and this opens for us a question – when we talk about the human spirit what are we referring to. For many the idea of spirit is something vague and difficult to get a hold of. However, the teachings of Spiritual Christianity make such things very clear for us so that we are able to get a hold of them and thereby respond to them so that they move from the realm of the ethereal into the realm of practical living. All spiritual teaching should be grounded in daily life; otherwise it remains something abstract and unable to bring about the changes needed for our regeneration.
Spiritual Christianity teaches that the things of the spirit are the things of the mind, that your spirit is your mind, and so its quality and nature are revealed in the thoughts and affections you entertain within it. Spiritual teachings are designed to address spiritual issues, which are really nothing more than the quality of our thought and affectional life. All genuine spiritual teachings have one focus, to assist us in becoming more compassionate and loving people through giving us insight in those selfish tendencies and behaviours that we fall victim to and so rob us of this compassion which is the life of heaven within us. In religion this process of being delivered from our selfishness is called salvation, and it is achieved through taking spiritual truths and making them a part of our life. A little honest personal reflection on the inner states of our life reveals a dark side – a side that is preoccupied with self interest and self gratification. Spiritual teachings are designed to support us to be able to confront this unhealthy side of ourselves so that we can see where we fall short. But we might ask, fall short of what? What is the target we need to be aiming for if we are to fulfill our spiritual potential? In Biblical language the target is framed in terms of what our chief motivations are which are succinctly captured in the two phrases, love to the Lord and love towards our neighbour.
Yet these two phrases, simple as they appear on the surface, are easily misunderstood. Again the teachings for Spiritual Christianity provide us with pretty clear teaching as to what this means. To love the Lord is to love the Word or Divine truths, for the Lord is the Word – to love the Word is to live according to our understanding of spiritual teachings drawn from it, for those who follow the teachings for the new Church these spiritual truths drawn from the Word are found in the works that make up our doctrines. So in this sense loving the Lord is very practical, it is simply an affirmative response to spiritual truths – or being in the effort to live from them to the best of our ability for no other reason than because we see its the right thing to do. This involves learning about spiritual truths and then finding ways of applying them. To learn them you have to make an effort to study them, and once we acquire this knowledge we then have an opportunity to apply them. This is loving the Lord. What then about loving our neighbour – this too has to do with loving the Lord but it is more connected with loving what is of the Lord in others. In other words, it involves looking to promote what is good and true in others – or living from a genuine concern for the spiritual well being of others as our central motivation. In the teachings for Spiritual Christianity this is often referred to a being useful, and in a very practical sense has to do with the attitudes we bring to our employment and other forms of serving others and our wider communities.
To be of use and to serve others is to love our neighbour, but we shouldn’t confuse the idea of our neighbour with the common meaning that sees our neighbour purely in terms of individual people, like the person next door. Spiritually our neighbour refers to what is closest to the spiritual teachings or values we hold to, and this love always has as its end in view spiritual goals and aspirations. So for example, if we are to love our neighbour in others, then we act from a perspective that looks to nurture and protect those traits that support a life of love, mercy, compassion, goodness and truth recognising that these are from the Lord while discouraging traits that tend towards self interest or behaviours that seek to get advantage through using others. But to love in this way we must be applying what we learn to ourselves ensuring that when we have acted selfishly that we then don’t then seek to justify our behaviour through creating a false perspective of the situation as this kind of behaviour opens us up to the hells, whose life in us is grounded in a disregard for what is good and true in favour of their opposites, what is evil and false. Loving the neighbour, as it relates to an individual person, is loving the good in a person, because this good is the Lord’s presence with them, for God alone is good. In a wider sense its loving the good in our communities and supporting those organisations that are able to promote this good in a greater way, and in a higher sense its loving the spiritual uses or goods within organisations directly committed to spiritual goals, such as religious and spiritual organisations, but above all it is loving the Lord who is the source of everything good and true.
But any look into human nature, and our own tendencies are a good place to see this, we can see that the temptation to love ourselves above others is a powerful one, and whenever we act from our own interests without consideration for the greater good we actually fall short of loving the Lord and our neighbour – we fall short of acting from our knowledge of spiritual principles and so of promoting what is good and true in a situation. This falling short is “missing the mark” if a genuine spiritual life is the target we are aiming for, interestingly the word used in Scripture to describe this kind of “missing” is the word “sin”. Sin simply means, “to miss the mark”, and “the mark”, in terms of living the spiritual life, is to be in the effort to see that our motives, affections, thoughts and actions carry as little self interest in them as possible. The world view carried by natural Christianity has traditionally placed a lot of moral emphasis on this word sin, and has looked to promote an acceptable code of external moral behaviour, but Spiritual Christianity sees things on a more fundamental level than this.
It’s not a question of morality but of spirituality. Morality focuses on external behaviour; genuine spirituality focuses on the inner motivations and thoughts that underlie the behaviour. So a person may live an external life that is morally perfect, be an upright citizen of their community and never put a foot wrong, but spiritually they may still be missing the mark. They miss the mark when they give no thought to the motives from which their behaviour flows. It could well be that the behaviour is motivated by a desire to promote their own interests, and they find that behaving in a moral upright way best does this. So spiritually it’s important to see that the idea of sin, or missing the mark, has nothing to do with our external moral behaviour, but is always focused on the motives that underlie it. Sin then, is acting for self, and that may result in behaviour that is highly moral or highly questionable from a moral perspective.
With these things in mind we now come to our reading from the Gospel and look to see how the elements of this reading capture the attitudes within the lower natural mind towards spiritual things. This lower part of the human mind accepts no authority other than itself in matters of life – it basically lives from a principle that it knows best, and when our sense of self is tied in to it, it becomes bound up in pride and arrogance which blinds us to spiritual truths and the challenges they make upon our life. What it can’t see is that the precursor to spiritual enlightenment is a genuine sense of humility; in fact this level of the natural mind doesn’t even know what humility is. A typical attitude this level of life might take is to draw comparisons between its own sense of its own moral uprightness with the behaviour of others and see itself as holding the moral high ground and from this see itself as having some sort of spiritual superiority. In the area of religion and spirituality this manifests as self righteousness and a feeling of being better than others and is certainly something to be on our guard against.
In the gospel story this attitude of the lower natural mind – and let me emphasise here, we all have this tendency to create illusions whereby we think we are better than others and it often comes to the fore we catch ourselves honing in on what we regard as another persons short comings – and the Word captures this tendency in its use of a symbolic tool to represent it. It is represented by the religious authorities in the story that are seen to challenge the Lord throughout the gospel (now because the Lord represents the Divine truth present in the human mind then what stands opposed to it in the story must represent those things in us that stand against this) In John’s gospel the term used to identify the things within us that are opposed to spiritual life is the term “the Jews”. This term is used to represent an attitude within us all that is antagonistic towards spiritual things. Remember the instruction given in spiritual writings relates to the inner world of our spirits – so we all have Jews and gentiles with us and when reading Scripture symbolically then these things are seen as attitudes we are prone to and not as races or particular peoples existing outside ourselves. This is how we read the text spiritually.
So let’s pick this up in verse 19 and 20 where it states…
Joh 1:19 And this is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent from Jerusalem priests and Levites, so that they should question him, “You, who are you?” (20) And he confessed and did not deny, and confessed, “_I_ am not the Christ [“the Anointed One”].”
John is beginning to make waves, and this has got back to the religious authorities of the day who respond by calling into question John’s own authority to do what he was doing…Now last week we saw that John the Baptist as the witness to the light, who is the Christ, represents what teaches us about the light. So leaving behind ideas of a historical person and entering the world of Biblical symbolism, we saw that what teaches us about the Lord today is the Word and so John is a symbolic figure who represents the literal sense of the Word that bears witness to the light or Divine Truth. When you first begin to take the Word seriously as something of spiritual value it begins to challenge our life and thinking. This is the essence of John’s massage; it is a call to make the paths straight a call to repentance. Repentance simply means to change your thinking – in a spiritual context if refers to an act of thinking and acting from spiritual truths, of taking them seriously and allowing them to challenge our old ways of thinking and being. John or the literal sense of the Word looks to challenge us to think in a different way about things – to lay aside our attitudes that we know best, to lay down our life of arrogance and intellectual pride so that we allow spiritual influences to gain a richer presence in our life. The massage of the Word at the John level openly challenges us to hand our life over to a different authority – to the Lord or the Word as a guide for our internal and external life and behaviour. This goes against our habitual established ways of doing things, our personal traditions, even our religion of self worship, all of which is what is meant symbolically here by the term “the Jews.”
What we will find if we begin to seriously consider the value of what lies in the Word is that the response from the lower natural mind to this intrusion of new ideas that challenge our entrenched ways of selfish life is to call spiritual teaching into question. Spiritual teachings are designed to make us uncomfortable. They bring things to the fore that we have been unwilling to face and deal with. When spiritual teachings begin to impact on our life to the point where we begin to see that we need to make some changes then our lower reasoning process kick into action and begin to challenge its authority in our life. This level of life is naturally resistant to change, particularly where that change is going to lead to a new order of things. The testimony of John is that the Lord is the Word, that the Word is Divine Truth and that we need to consider this claim seriously and hopefully this will lead us to make changes in our life and thought. Our natural man is opposed to the spiritual man and this resistance is described here symbolically as the response of the Jews – from out of our old established patterns of thought based on self interest we send envoys or we question the authority of the Word and these elements within us that carry this opposition to spiritual life is symbolised here by priests and Levites. The priests and Levites are those elements with us that call into question the message the Word that calls for changes in our life. They represent that side of us that doesn’t want to change; that seeks to keep things as they are. As such they represent a tendency within us all that regards the Word and the things of religion with suspicion. This will become clearer as we see the development of their antagonism towards Jesus as the story moves along.
To the natural mind the Scriptures or Word is often dismissed as nothing more than a book filled with human weaknesses and frailties, it focused on John or its most external part the literal text. And indeed when read as to its surface meaning it certainly appears that way – but if we are open we will see that this surface meaning does have pointers to something much deeper within it, the Christ or Divine truth – this surface meaning is John who prepares the way by pointing us deeper, but we will only heed this leading if we ourselves are open to seeing ourselves as we truly are, thereby humbling ourselves before the Lord and allowing His Word to become an authority in our life. The message is…
Joh 1:23 “I [am] ‘a voice shouting in the wilderness: “Make straight the way of [the] LORD,”‘
May we hear this voice that we might know more fully the life of heaven within…
Amen.
