LIFE LESSONS
JUDAS, SON OF JAMES
DR. JIM DIXON
JOHN 14:18-23
DECEMBER 19, 2004
Some of you are sports fans and some of you are not. Some of you love football. Some of you do not. The last service had a lot of people who love football and wanted to get home for the 11:00 Bronco game. However, you feel about sports and football, there’s no denying this. It’s not easy being a quarterback in the National Football League. Of course, starting quarterbacks are well compensated, make millions of dollars a year. Most of us would like to try that on for a few years, but they are only one hit away from serious injury, one hit away from life-changing injury. NFL quarterbacks have to be able to read complex defensive schemes. NFL quarterbacks need to be able to lead complex offensive strategies. They need to have a good touchdown/interception ratio. They need to throw more touchdown passes, maybe twice as many touchdown passes as they do interceptions. Of course, most of all, NFL quarterbacks need to win. If you don’t win, you don’t keep your job for long.
Here in the city of Denver there’s a lot of controversy about our starting quarterback for the Denver Broncos, Jake Plummer. His winning record is actually pretty good for NFL quarterbacks. He’s won far more games than he has lost. He’s thrown some strange interceptions and there are some people who think that his brain just occasionally takes a vacation. Last Sunday an angry fan said kind of aggravating things to Jake Plummer. He lost his cool and he flipped the fan off, gave him the mile high salute. Of course, this last Friday the NFL fined Jake Plummer. But there’s no denying that Jake Plummer is a man of passion. He has passion. He loves the game of football, and he can’t wait to get out on the field. He loves the thrill of competition and he has zeal for the game.
It surprises a lot of people when they study the Bible and they see that God loves people of passion. That’s what God loves. God loves people of passion. Of course, God doesn’t care about football but God cares about people, and God loves people of passion. The biblical word, the Greek word for passion is the word, “pathos.” This word means, “to suffer,” and it doesn’t refer to just any kind of suffering. Pathos, passion, refers to suffering in a cause, someone who is willing to suffer for a cause, someone who is willing to suffer in a quest, someone who, for that quest, has great zeal, great ardor, somebody who has deep enthusiasm. This is precious to God. So, this is our first Life Lesson this morning as we look at Judas, the Son of James. The first Life Lesson is this: God loves people of passion. Particularly with regard to the kingdom of heaven, God loves people of passion.
Last year 700,000 men and women journeyed to Cluny, France, to see the Abbey Church of St. Peter and St. Paul. The strange thing is that church is in ruins today. All that remains are just a few towers in the South Transept. And yet 700,000 people pilgrimaged there to see the ruins of the Cluny, the Abbey Church of St. Peter and St. Paul. They went because it once was the largest church in the world. Church historians believe that it’s the largest church ever built in Christian history. It had a cathedral sanctuary and the inside of the sanctuary was two football fields long. This church was huge. The Cluny Church, the Abbey Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, was the center of the monastic movement in Europe and it was the world headquarters of the Benedictine Order, with its 10,000 Benedictine priests and 1,100 Benedictine monasteries. Indeed, the Abbey Church of St. Peter and St. Paul was the center of the Christian world, second only to Rome. The Abbey was second in power, only having less power than the Pope.
The church was completed around the year 1066 AD. It took 160 years to build this church. For five hundred years, that cathedral was filled with people. The church had passion. They had passion for Christ, passion to know Christ, passion for intimacy with Christ. The sounds of music, the sounds of Gregorian chants filled the air. The cathedral was always packed. People went out to help the poor. People went out in ministry to take the Gospel to the nations. People joined cloisters where they could be alone with God. People were passionate for God.
But over 500 years something happened. They lost their passion. That’s what church historians tell us. The people of the Abbey Church of St. Peter and St. Paul lost their passion. The truth is that region of France, the Cluny Region, was the wealthiest region in all of France, and the people had become rich. As they became rich, they began to lose their passion for God. They began to lose their passion for worship. The cathedral began to get fewer and fewer people worshipping. They began to lose their passion for intimacy with God and they didn’t spend time in the Word. They began to lose their passion for the poor. They no longer reached out to the hurting and the afflicted. They began to lose their passion for the Gospel and to take that Gospel to the nations. “Someone else will do it. We’re rich now. We’ve got too many fun things to do.”
Incredibly, by the 11th century, the Cluny Church, the Abbey Church of St. Peter and St. Paul had become so small that the Benedictine Order shut it down. Later in that century, the 1ih century, that great cathedral sanctuary was filled with straw. During the wintertime, the animals of that region of France came in to keep from exposure to the cold. Later a wealthy man bought the cathedral. He was a man who had owned rock quarries, and he bought the cathedral so he could just tear it down and sell the bricks and stones, the destruction of the cathedral for his personal profit. A sad story, and the truth is the church of Jesus Christ has no future without passion. This Church has no future without passion. Unless we’re people of passion, we’ve got no present. God loves people of passion, passion for His Kingdom.
Fifteen years ago, Barb and I stood with some friends on the ruins of what once had been the Church at Laodicea. We were in what is now Turkey, what was then Asia Minor. We stood there on the ruins of what once was the Church of Laodicea, one of the seven Churches of Asia. Of course, in Revelation, chapter 3, Jesus sent a message to that church and Jesus said they had lost their passion. They were very wealthy. Jesus said, “You say to yourself, ‘I am rich. I have prospered. I need nothing,’ not knowing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked.” He said they were lukewarm, neither cold nor hot. They had lost their passion and because they had lost their passion, Jesus said He was sick in His stomach. He said He just wanted to throw up. Incredible because Jesus is looking for people with passion.
We come today to Judas, Son of James. It surprises a lot of people that there were two disciples names Judas. Everyone knows of Judas Iscariot. Very few know of Judas, Son of James. The truth is, in the Bible he’s just called Judas of James. He may have been the brother of James. He was probably the son of James. This Judas is mentioned in all four Gospels and in the Book of Acts but only twice and only two of the Gospels is he actually called Judas, Son of James. In the other Gospels, he is called Thaddeus or he is called Lebbaeus. Twice he is called Thaddeus. Once he is called Lebbaeus. His real name was Judas but he was given this nickname, this term of affection Thaddeus, which comes from a root word meaning “breast” or Lebbaeus which comes from the Hebrew word “led” which means, “heart.” Thaddeus and Lebbaeus mean, “men of heart” or “a man of affection,” “man of passion.” Surely Judas of James was a man of big heart. He was a man of passion.
That is why, in one Gospel account, in Mark’s Gospel, in one of the early manuscripts this Judas was called Judas the Zealot. He may or may not have been a member of the Zealot Party, but he had zeal and ardor. He had passion and his passion was for Christ. His passion was for the cause of Christ so when Jesus said to the disciples, “A little while and the world will see Me no more, but then you will see Me,” Judas had a few questions. He said, “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us and not to the world?”
The rendering of the Greek there is kind of unfortunate. It’s the RSV translation, but in the Greek the real force is “what had happened.” That’s the meaning of the Greek. What has happened that You will manifest Yourself to us but not to the world?” Because his passion was that Christ would be manifested to the world. That was his passion. The word in this passage for manifest is the Greek word, “emphanizo.” It has the same root as the Greek “epiphania” from which we get the word “epiphany.” The word is found in Exodus, chapter 33, and the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament. It’s the word used to describe the theophany, the supernatural revelation of God to Moses on Mt. Sinai. This is what Judas Thaddeus was looking for, this man of passion. He wanted a global epiphany. He wanted Jesus to be manifested to the world. He wanted some incredible event to take place, the new age to dawn, the millennium to begin. He wanted Jesus’ global epiphany.
Jesus had a little different epiphany in mind, a different manifestation. Jesus was talking about a personal epiphany, a personal manifestation. Jesus made this incredible statement to Judas. Jesus said, “If a man loves Me, he will keep My Word and the Father will love him and We will come to him and make our home in him.” What an incredible and presence and He was prophesying Pentecost when statement, a personal inward epiphany. He would be manifested within. Of course, when you look at this pass contextually, you see that Jesus is about to introduce the person of the Holy Spirit and His indwelling power the Holy Spirit would descend upon all those who believed and would make His home within. Jesus and the Father, through the Spirit, would take up residence, would tabernacle within the heart of the believer. The Bible promises that even today whenever anybody accepts Christ, whenever anybody asks Jesus to be Lord and they come in love of Christ, in that moment they make the comment, still today, the Spirit comes, Jesus comes, and the Father comes and they make their home in us. Personal, inward epiphany.
Judas Thaddeus would ultimately come to understand that, and he would have passion for the epiphany of Christ globally and inwardly. This is our passion as Christians, and we come to worship because we desire that inward epiphany. We want Christ within us to rise. We come to worship. We enter into Bible Study and devotions. We enter into ministry and service. We enter into Christian fellowship and communion. We do it because we’re passionate about His epiphany, His epiphany inwardly and His epiphany to the world. Without this passion, the Church is dead.
In the year 1830, right here in Colorado, there was a mountain rendezvous camp established up in the mountains in the region that today is called Summit County. This mountain rendezvous camp was called Three Rivers and it was right there where the three rivers came together, the Blue, the Snake and the Ten Mile River. Right where these three came together, there was this mountain rendezvous camp. Thirty years later in 1860, that mountain rendezvous camp of three rivers had become a little town. It was a little town called Three Rivers.
From that town in the year 1860, a man went forth. He was a young man. His name was Thomas Dillon. He was a young man and everybody loved him. Everybody in that little town liked him. He was good looking. He was energetic. He was charismatic. He was likeable but he got the fever. He got the fever for gold. It was the wintertime and he announced to the little town that he was going out in search of gold.
They said, “This isn’t the time. You’re young. You’re strong, but there are dangers in the winter, dangers from animals, danger from inclement weather. Don’t go. But Thomas Dillon went anyway and he never came back. They never found his body but they missed him so they renamed the town. Three Rivers became the town of Dillon. Of course, you can go up to the mountains in Summit County today and you can see the town of Dillon there. It’s really the fourth town of Dillon. That town has moved four times. The original Dillon is now under the lake that bears the name of Thomas Dillon.
It wasn’t uncommon in those days for people to have a passion for gold. Of course, from 1870 to 1875, three thousand people moved up to the region of Georgetown. Two thousand five hundred moved to the region of Silver Plume, 5,500 people all with the passion for gold. This gold fever spread across this state and really all over the world. It’s no different today. People still have passion for gold. People are still mining gold. People are mining gold in the stock market. People are mining gold in Wall Street. People are mining for gold in the corporate world. People are mining for gold in their private businesses, their individual enterprises. Everybody mining for gold.
There are a lot of passions in this world, but understand that if you’re a Christian, if you’ve taken Jesus truly to be your Lord and Savior, He wants His Kingdom to be your highest passion. He said, “Seek first My Kingdom and its righteousness.” You can have many passions. If you have a passion to make money, use that passion to serve a higher passion. Serve the kingdom of heaven. Make money for Christ. Give your money to Him. If you have a passion for sports, maybe you can find a way to serve the kingdom of heaven with that passion. Help the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Help Athletes in Action who are seeking to use the world of sports to take the Gospel of Christ to people. If you’ve got a passion for music, join the choir. Work in our music department. If you’ve got a passion for kids, we need you in the Sunday School. We need you as tutors in the inner city. Let His Kingdom be your highest passion. Without passion, the church of Jesus Christ is dead. Well, we learn that from Judas Thaddeus.
We have a second life lesson from Judas Thaddeus and the second life lesson is this. God loves people of compassion. In the year 260 AD, very early in the life of the church, a man was born in Israel which the Romans called Palestine. He was born in Caesarea Maritima, north of what today is called Tel Aviv. His name was Eusebius. He would become what historians today call the “Father of the Christian Church.” He was a church historian, the greatest of his time. Eusebius searched the archives, the historical archives of ancient cities. He interviewed people who were descendants of biblical personalities. He researched the life of the early church and he wrote it down, finding out everything he could. Now, Eusebius tells us that he journeyed to the kingdom of Edessa. Edessa was the name of an ancient kingdom which today is part of modem-day Turkey and near the town of Urfa.
He went there to the ancient kingdom of Edessa and he went through the historical archives in Edessa and according to Eusebius, he found two letters that were of great interest. One letter was from Abgar V, who was the King of Edessa, and it was a letter written to Jesus Christ, written in the first half of the first century, written to Jesus Christ from Abgar V, King of Edessa. He was asking Jesus to come to Edessa and heal him, that he had heard of Jesus and heard He was the Messiah. He was in the early stages of leprosy.
Eusebius found another letter in those historical archives. It was a letter from Christ, a letter from Jesus. It was not written personally by Him but by one of His representatives and it pronounced a blessing upon this Edessan King because he had faith from such a distance. There was a promise in that letter that one day a disciple would come. Eusebius looked further into the archives and he researched other sources as well and he found that a disciple did go to Edessa right then in the first part or the middle part of the 1st century and that disciple was Judas Thaddeus. He was the one who was sent. He came in a ministry of compassion. He healed Abgar V, the King of Edessa, and he had a ministry of healing and care giving, a ministry of compassion, and the Gospel went forth in power. Decades later, by the time of Abgar IX, all of Edessa was Christian. We know this from all historical sources. An amazing story.
Many centuries later there was a spurious book that arose called “The Acts of Thaddeus.” It embellishes all of this stuff with regard to Edessa and it’s not historically reliable, but the writings of Eusebius are and they’re of great interest to scholars. There’s really hardly anyone who doubts that Judas Thaddeus did indeed go to the region of Edessa and he ministered in a ministry of compassion and compassion empowers the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
There’s not enough compassion in this world. Do you agree with that? There’s not enough compassion in this world, not enough compassion in my heart. Maybe you feel that way about your heart. Thirty-two years ago in the year 1972, an 85-year-old woman came out of a grocery store in Juneau, Alaska, 85 years old and frail. She had purchased a bag of groceries. She knew she shouldn’t have gone out. It was the dead of winter, and they were in the midst of a blizzard and she was frail, but she needed groceries. She bought a bag of groceries that day. She came out of the grocery store, stepped out into the street and she fell. She fell under the blowing snow. She tried to get up. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t get up from a fall in the best of times. She tried again and failed again. She ultimately died right there in the streets of Juneau, Alaska in 1972. She died of hypothermia.
The authorities know exactly what happened to her because they were able to find an eyewitness, a man who was sitting in the comfort of his house looking out the window. He saw her. He saw the whole thing. The authorities said, “Well, why didn’t you go to her? Why didn’t you help her?” He said, “I didn’t even know her.” There’s not enough compassion in this world. Are you willing to help people you don’t know? Are we willing to help people we don’t know?
Jesus said, “All of the commandments are summed up in these two.” “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind,” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” When someone said, “Who’s my neighbor?”, Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan. The message was your neighbor is anyone who is hurting. Your neighbor is anyone who is in need. The Good Samaritan was a man from Samaria who saw the wounded man on the Jericho Road and Jesus said he was “moved with compassion.” That’s what God loves. That’s what Christ is looking for, people who are moved with compassion. The disciples and Judas Thaddeus surely heard this message many times. I want you to see a little clip from the movie Forrest Gump starring Tom Hanks:
Forrest: “I remember the bus ride on the first day of school very well.”
Bus Driver: “Are you coming along?”
Forrest: “Mama said not to be taking rides from strangers.”
Bus Driver: “This is the bus to school.”
Forrest: “I’m Forrest. Forrest Gump.”
Bus Driver: “I’m Dorothy Harris.”
Forrest: “Well, now we ain’t strangers anymore.” “You know it’s funny what a young man recollects because I don’t remember being born. I don’t recall what I got for my first Christmas. I don’t know when I went on my first outdoor picnic, but I do remember the first time I heard the sweetest voice in the wide world.”
Jenny: “You can sit here if you want.”
Forrest: “I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life. She was like an angel.”
Jenny: “Well, are you gonna sit down or aren’t ya? What’s wrong with your leg?”
Forrest: “Nothing at all, thank you. My legs are just fine and dandy.” “I just sat there next to her on that bus and had a conversation all the way to school. Next to Mama, no one ever talked to me or asked me questions.”
Jenny: “Are you stupid or something?”
Forrest: “Mama says, ‘Stupid is as stupid does.’”
Jenny: “I’m Jenny.”
Forrest: “I’m Forrest. Forrest Gump. From that day on we was always together. Jenny and me was like peas and carrots.”
Well, there’s not enough compassion in this world. With children, there’s not enough compassion. Sometimes school bus drivers don’t have enough compassion. Other kids on the bus don’t have enough compassion, but even children know when you see somebody with compassion, you’ve seen an angel. You see a little bit of heaven in a person who shows compassion.
I’ve shared with some of you before the deep nature of the compassion that Christ calls us to. There are three Greek words for compassion in the New Testament. The simplest word and the easiest form of compassion is the Greek word, “sumpathos” from which we get the word “sympathy.” It means, “literally with suffering.” It means, “to suffer with.” It means, “to feel someone’s suffering.” Sumpathos. Hopefully all of us are capable of that. We can feel someone’s suffering. Even in a movie we can feel someone’s suffering. Sumpathos. But there’s a deeper word that Jesus uses, the Bible uses, and that deeper word is “splagchnizomai.” Splagchnizomai is found in many forms in the Bible but it means, “to feel someone’s hurt,” “to feel their suffering,” and “to act to help them.” That’s deeper, isn’t it? It’s a deeper form of compassion. You feel their pain and their suffering and you move to help them. Splagchnizomai.
But there’s a deeper compassion still and this is the compassion Christ calls His people to and it’s expressed by the Greek word “eleos.” This word means you feel someone’s hurt; you feel their suffering; you move to help them even though they’re your enemy, even though they’ve hurt you, even though they’ve sinned against you.” That’s the call of Christ. The amazing thing is, if we have this compassion, there’s no stopping the Gospel. If we, as His people, have that kind of compassion, there’s no stopping this church because the kingdom of heaven is empowered by compassion. It’s the call of Christ upon His people.
I think in the beginning, Judas Thaddeus didn’t understand. He just wanted that global epiphany. He wanted Christ manifested to the world. That was his passion but of course he came to understand that that personal epiphany, when you invite Jesus to be your Savior and Lord and Jesus takes up residence in you and then you allow Him to be manifested through you, that it’s through that personal epiphany that ministry takes place. As Christ is manifested through us, the Gospel does indeed impact the nations. Now, one day Jesus will come again, and it will be a global epiphany, but until that day, we’re called to minister and ministry begins with compassion as Christ is manifested through us.
I want to conclude with a little story. I know you’ve all heard of Charlie Chaplin. Charlie Chaplin died in 1977 at the age of 88. He was the most famous comedian in the silent film era. He was also one of the founders of United Artist Pictures. In 1975, two years before he died, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, Sir Charlie Chaplin.
One day Charlie Chaplin was in Monte Carlo. He was in Monte Carlo and just walking around. He was on vacation. He was world famous but he was just minding his own business walking around Monaco. He saw something that amazed him. They were having a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest. He’d not seen one of those before and he thought to himself, “I’ve got to enter this thing. So, he went back to his hotel room and he found an outfit that he’d actually used in one of his movies and he went and he entered the contest. I think you can guess what happened. He didn’t win. He took third place in the Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest. Apparently there were two guys in Monte Carlo who looked more like Charlie Chaplin than Charlie Chaplin did.
I know that none of us here are trying to look like Charlie Chaplin. I’m not trying to look like him. You’re not trying to look like him. But I also know this. There are many of us here who are trying to look like Jesus Christ. Not physically. We don’t even know what His physical appearance looked like, but we’re trying to look like Him in character. We want to have His passion and compassion. We want to have His love. We want to have His nature, His morality. We want to be Christ-like. We’re trying to look like Him. This call is at the heart of the Gospel when He said, “Follow Me.” Of course, this call was on Judas Thaddeus too.
I hope that you take this call seriously and as you leave this place today it just won’t be another Sunday. You won’t just go back to doing business as usual, but you’ll actually consider seeking first His Kingdom and His righteousness. God loves people of passion and God loves people of compassion. Let’s look to the Lord with a word of prayer.