The Switch…

To Joy (part 3) 

With Jesus’ death The Switch had begun, from humans being stuck in the ways of this world influenced so heavily by evil, to the world of love and joy the Father was setting up through his Son. But how on earth was Jesus going to make such a world real to his disciples? 

It was by a switch in their relationship. He’d just told them in John 15:13 that “the greatest love of all was giving up one’s life for one’s friends.” He then immediately goes on to say in verse 14, “You are my friends.” 

Well that was different, he’d never called them that before. He also goes on to say in verse 15, “I no longer call you servants.” And what Jesus meant by “servant” – as he goes on to explain – was someone who “doesn’t know his master’s business.” And if anyone knows what that’s like, it’s millions of people in this world today who work for a large company without ever meeting the boss or knowing what his thoughts and plans are, and if you met him in the elevator you’d be invisible to him. 

And for many people that’s becoming a horrible, joyless way to live, because in reality you’re just a cog in a machine, and when your profitable use to the company is over you’re put out to pasture like an old horse that can’t pull a cart anymore. 

And how many millions of people endure such an existence? And especially in countries where they have no choice, the work conditions are awful, and the rewards are few. You wonder what the point of such a life is – including the lives of Jesus’ own disciples too, who’d slogged their lives away as fishermen, paying exorbitant fees to the Romans for their fish just to prop up an empire they had no connection with.

But Jesus tells his disciples he’s not like that. Yes, he’d called them to follow him, go where he sent them, listen to his instructions like any good student of a Jewish rabbi should, but his purpose for all of it was to open up his Father’s world to them, “for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you,” verse 15.  

As his friends, Jesus wanted his disciples totally connected with his Father and his world of love and joy, a tremendous switch from just being cogs in a machine…(continued on Monday)