Not
everything is life is of equal clarity. There are things that seem fuzzy,
unclear in the moment. If everything was equally clear, we would have all
purchased Microsoft stock when it was only a few dollars a share. We operate in
a world with so much information and yet so little information that we actually
need right now to make decision. We are always operating on less than 100%
information.
We
read emails and texts and have to guess about the meaning. And then we get
upset when someone misunderstands what we wrote! The passing of information is
an imperfect art. And even when we do it perfectly, the other person might be
missing key information to the full context and back story so that they
understand exactly what we were trying to convey. Their mood in the moment,
their reaction to unseen factors can shift how they hear our perfectly clear
communication. Or like I did just yesterday, send the message to the wrong
person!
Even
some parts of Scripture are not a clear to us today as they might have been to
the first recipients. Some of the cultural and religious context of that day
has been lost. All the personal conversations are gone. There is no email
archive or voice recording vault with those for easy access. We can’t even get
emails of current history to help fill in the blanks. Hard drives get removed
and destroyed. Servers get wiped of evidence. Multiple email addresses go
largely unnoticed. But I digress.
Even
today we don’t have access to complete communication. So as we look back at
some parts of Scripture and have questions, it should be expected. So much of
Scripture is pretty clear in meaning. We might kick against the Truth being
presented, dismissing it because of some preconceived idea about our own
superior grasp of the universe, but what the text says is crystal clear.
But
there are times when the fog of time seems to take over. I think our text for
today is just such a passage. I have looked and read people’s interpretation of
what this text says for the last three decades. I am no surer of exactly what
is meant now than when I started. I still sit in the fog. And when I read some who
write with such absolute certainty of the meaning, I have to restrain myself.
The fog must be thicker where they are than from my vantage point.
Water
and blood are both symbols of something important. Water could be physical
birth. Blood could be sacrificial death. I’m not sure. I don’t think they are
connected to baptism, but I could be wrong. I do know that John must have known
that his readers would have gotten exactly what he meant when they first read
these words. They would have understood the testimony John was talking about
that put Jesus at the center of authentic Christianity.
John
tells us that these two, the water and the blood, are joined by the Spirit in
bringing the Truth he has brought and they have believed to light. This is in
contrast to what the false teachers were teaching. Something about the water and
the blood, what it meant and they understood at that time, was missing from
what the false teachers were teaching. And this missing element was essential
to being a Jesus-follower.
I
think a possible meaning of the water is Jesus physical birth. He was fully
human, something some of the early false understandings of Jesus taught. They
said Jesus’ life was not really human life, but some illusion of reality. So
for John to tell us that Jesus came by water, had a real physical birth, a real
mother, a real passage through a birth canal engulfed in amniotic fluid, would
be a reinforcement of and validation of the reality of Jesus’ humanity.
For
me the blood and its meaning in this verse is even foggier than the water. The
blood could be blood during physical birth. It could be connected to His
physical blood connecting Him to humanity. It might be His physical blood that
was actually shed for our sins. It could be the meaning of the blood spilled,
the sacrificial nature of His life and death on our behalf. I am just not sure.
I
know that the water, the blood and the Spirit all tell us something about the
fact that Jesus is essential to salvation. Without Jesus, fully man, fully God,
we don’t have salvation. Our sins are not forgiven. We are still stuck in our
sin and sin’s consequences. We haven’t passed from death to life. We are still
in life.
I
wish the breeze would blow and clear everything up. One day He will! When our
faith becomes sight, everything that can be clear will be clear. We won’t understand
everything: only God can do that. But everything that we need to understand
will be understood with absolute clarity.