Sunday Sermon - J. Vernon McGee - The Hands of Jesus

Sunday Sermon - J. Vernon McGee - The Hands of Jesus

You can tell a lot about a person from looking at their hands.

We once had a chocolate praying hands at work; an Easter confection, and some people found it strange to eat it.  I realized at the time that I was very familiar with the image of praying hands from my youth, although I haven't seen it much recently, and I had never seen it portrayed in chocolate before.  Chocolate makes everything look a little better, I think.  But I also had never thought of it as the hands of Jesus, which my co-workers assumed it to be.  In the seventies, when I was little, I just took it as a reminder to pray- here's a representation of somebody's hands- here's a reminder to pray.  Because it was the seventies, I remember white praying hands and black praying hands and tan praying hands.  Maybe you see them as the hands of Jesus in Gethsemane.  I don't know.

Today I'm listening to the Sunday Sermon from the series entitled:

Jesus the Man -

Near the conclusion of the gospel of John, Pilate said to the people "Behold the man" while Jesus was wearing a purple robe and crown of thorns given to him in mockery.  No one could have guessed that this trial in front of a mad crowd, in the back of beyond somewhere in a big city but on the Roman frontier- could mean much to anyone who wasn't already there and in the crowd for the holiday.  But the city wasn't just any city.  And this holiday wasn't just any celebration by some little minority sect.  The scene took place in the center of the world, where God chose to come to Earth, on more than one occasion.  Pilate's actions, designed to calm down the crowd so that life could go back to normal and he could get some peace and quiet, set in motion the events by which all time and eternity has now become divided.  It's either A.D. or C.E; B.C. or B.C.E, heaven or hell, only because of what happened next.

"Behold the man" is what Pilate says at the end of John, and we do in representations everywhere.  This statement is contrasted with John the Baptist's statement "Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world" that is spoken near the beginning of the gospel.  Today, we see more than Pilate saw but maybe less than the Baptist, even if you are, too.  If you don't want to admit his centrality, you don't have to, but the dates you use when you cite a tear are testimony of his importance. 

The hands of Jesus in John 20:27 are touchable, effable, and changed the world, not because they were a myth or a legend, but because they were real, present and are reaching out to us now even with the holes in them.  It's because of the holes that we're even aware of who Jesus is. 

We work with our hands and are defined by what we do with them, and we get in trouble with our hands too.  Are we grasping, or giving, blessing someone or killing them? 

"A laboring man will someday settle all the disputes of this world," which is held in those nail scarred hands.