The Ministry of Imagination
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jeremy_1_12-26-2025_133135: [00:00:00] Welcome to another episode of Rebuilding Faith.
These are 10 minute Bible messages for people with questions and doubts, and this is episode 50. It's a big mile marker on our journey. Through the gospel of John.
Listen, there's one thing. The history of evolution has taught us that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands the new territories, and it crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously. I'm simply saying that life, finds a way.
jeremy_1_12-26-2025_133135: This has been so fun to unpack verse by verse as we just go through it and see how long it's gonna take.
So we're in chapter 11. That's how far we've made it in 50 episodes, and we'll see how many more are left through the gospel of John. Well, where we're picking up on the story today is that Jesus has just healed his friend Lazarus from the dead. And now we're going to see the reactions. That this causes, and like everything that Jesus does, there are gonna be some people that like it [00:01:00] and some people that aren't too fond of what he's up to.
And we see how this plays out in John 11, beginning in verse 45. Many of the people who were with Mary believed in Jesus when they saw this happen. Him bring Lazarus back to life. But some went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. This is such a hilarious set of reactions. So John says, some believed in Jesus, which.
Yeah, I mean, it seems a bit obvious. You just watched him raise a guy from the dead who had been dead for four days, brings this guy back to life, and they're like, wow, maybe this guy is worth believing in. And reminds me of the theme verse as to why John wrote this gospel to begin with is for moments like this, John 20, verse 31.
But these are written so that you may continue to believe that [00:02:00] Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing in Him, you will have life by the power of his name. So we looked at that in the opening of the series in the beginning of the Gospel of John that John is writing, so that people will see what Jesus has done.
They will believe in him, and they will have life in the person of Jesus. And we see this is happening now in a result of what happened with Lazarus, but then there are others who go and tattle on him. This is a hilarious reaction. Wait till we tell the religious leaders what you did. I mean, he, he just raised someone from the dead and this is what they go and report and, try to get him in trouble for this.
You begin to realize sometimes religion can get things very, very wrong. So, John 11, check out verse 47. Then the leading priests and the Pharisees called the high council together. Oh, we gotta have a [00:03:00] meeting. What are we going to do? They ask each other. This man certainly performs many miraculous signs.
If we allow him to go on like this soon, everyone will believe in him, and then the Roman Army will come and destroy both our temple and our nation. Now what they're doing is having a meeting of what's called the Sanhedrin, which was the Jewish Ruling Council. It's 70 men led by a high priest, and they were responsible for the local rule of that area.
And I want you to notice their argument here. If everyone starts to believe in Jesus, it will disrupt the way that we do things here. Now, you might think this is an altruistic response, like, Hey, we won't be able to keep doing all the good that we're doing, but. They're worried for their own positions of power and prestige.
I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.
jeremy_1_12-26-2025_133135: the Romans are gonna come in and stop what we've got going on here. We've got a good thing going here.
We can't let [00:04:00] this guy mess it up. That is the essence of their argument, and we see the same argument used even in the church. Today. See, we have created a model of ministry that works well for a lot of people.
But when you poke holes in that or you point out that, hey, there are some weaknesses in this model, or this model doesn't work for everyone, or what about some problems we see in the model? It's often not received well, and then you're left with a choice to make of you either fall in line with the model or you often have to go somewhere else and.
I get in a lot of conversations with people who are trying to navigate this tension. As the theologian Walter Brueggeman wrote, it is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge [00:05:00] as the only thinkable one.
Now, I love this phrase, the Ministry of Imagination, because that's exactly what Jesus is causing in this story. When they see him raise Lazarus back to life, their imaginations are ignited. What else can he do? What else is he capable of? What else could be changed around here? If he can do that? Which is exactly why the religious leaders are having the reaction they're having.
This guy is a threat. He is getting people to think about things, to challenge things, to imagine alternatives that we don't want them to imagine. So they have to figure out, how do we stop this? Verse 49. Caiaphas who was high priest at that time said, you don't know what you're talking about. You don't realize that it's better for you.
That one man should die for the people [00:06:00] than for the whole nation to be destroyed. Now, he did not say this on his own as high priest at that time. He was led to prophesy that Jesus would die for the entire nation. Not only for that nation, but to bring together and unite all the children of God scattered around the world.
Now, Caiaphas is calling on the old scapegoating technique that we've talked about already throughout this series. This is how we're gonna solve it. We're going to blame all of our problems on Jesus, and then remove that. You know, when we remove the problem, then the problems go. Away.
He's too dangerous to be left alive.
jeremy_1_12-26-2025_133135: Now we're able to read this with all of the insight in hindsight, right?
We get the irony that John intends for when you know how this story ends. That yeah, Jesus is in fact going to die for the whole nation, for the whole world, but not in the way that Caiaphas is intending this statement to be understood. Now John is again pointing to the fact that Jesus is [00:07:00] going to unite all people the entire world together through him.
Now, as I reflect on this reaction to Jesus healing Lazarus, it's a reminder to me that a clear view of Jesus is a threat to those in control, right? We see this then and we see this now, and this is why the church. Often behaves very strangely when the church gets power because all of a sudden this imagination of what God could do, of how Jesus might propose alternatives is no longer worth pursuing.
'cause now we want to maintain what we have. We wanna, we keep this good thing going rather than inviting Jesus to show up and say, Hey, what could you do? What? What new thing? Will arise. And so we directly see that whether you have a, a relationship with power or how you have a relationship with power often influences [00:08:00] how you react to what Jesus is doing.
Now, we recently went through a book called The Cross and the Lynching Tree, in our online community. And this is written by a guy named James Cone, a phenomenal book, a very heavy book in light of what he talks about. But he has this insight, and I want to close with this. This is what James Cohen says in that book.
The cross as a locust of divine revelation is not good news for the powerful for those who are comfortable with the way things are, or for anyone whose understanding of religion is aligned with power. This is a fascinating insight that Cone offers. If the cross or the fact that Jesus doesn't follow a certain set of rules is threatening to you, it likely indicates that you have an unhealthy relationship with power.
And if you are [00:09:00] a part of something that is reacting this way to the cross or to Jesus, then you're probably a part of something that has an unhealthy relationship with power, and this is what the story revealed to us then and what this continues to reveal to us today. I'll see you next week on Rebuilding Faith.
