A Deeper Dive into the Christology of Sight and Blindness
John 9 is not primarily a story about a blind man. It is a story about who Jesus is and what He does to the world He enters. The healing is the occasion; the revelation is the event. By the chapter’s end, a man who never saw is worshiping, and leaders who have spent their lives reading Scripture are confirmed in their blindness. The sign does not merely restore — it exposes. That double movement is what this study pursues.
I. Suffering Reframed: The Question Jesus Would Not Answer (9:1—3)
The disciples’ question — “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” — was not stupid. It was theological, and it reflected a serious interpretive tradition in Second Temple Judaism. But Jesus redirects it entirely. He does not settle the debate between the man’s guilt and his parents’. He refuses the premise.
John 9:3 “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”
Jesus is not saying suffering is never connected to sin. He is saying that in this case the diagnostic question misses the point entirely. The man’s blindness is not a sentence — it is a stage. This is consistent with the Servant Songs of Isaiah, where suffering becomes the setting for God’s revealing action:
Isaiah 42:7 “…to open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness.”
The Servant of Isaiah does not explain blindness; He ends it. Jesus reads His own ministry in that same register — not as explanation, but as action.
II. The Light Makes the Mud: A Christological Act (9:4—7)
The method Jesus uses — spitting on the ground, making mud, applying it to the man’s eyes — is conspicuously unusual. John does not record another healing done this way. Its significance lies not in technique but in echo. In Genesis, God forms the human creature from the dust of the ground and breathes life into him (Gen. 2:7). Here, the one who declared Himself the light of the world kneels in the dirt and works with clay.
Genesis 2:7 “Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life…”
Patristic Voice — Augustine of Hippo (354–430)Tractates on the Gospel of John, Tract. 44 “He who made man of clay, made also eyes of clay. For it was he who formed man from the clay of the earth; and therefore, because he himself was present in the flesh, he did this great miracle, that he might show himself to be the same.” Teacher’s Note: Augustine reads the mud not as an odd healing method but as a Christological signature — the one creating sight is the one who created sight to begin with. The act is not separate from the claim; it is the claim.
This Christological argument is not a later theological overlay. John has prepared for it from the Prologue: “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” (1:3). The healing in chapter 9 is a Creator-act. The one sending the man to wash in Siloam (“sent”) is Himself the one who was sent — and who sends.
III. Sight and Its Cost: Testimony Under Pressure (9:8—34)
The healed man’s interrogations form the theological and narrative center of the chapter. He is questioned three times. Each time, his testimony grows more confident; each time, the opposition grows more rigid. He begins with “The man they call Jesus” (v. 11), moves to “He is a prophet” (v. 17), and arrives at a sustained and reasoned defense: “If this man were not from God, he could do nothing” (v. 33).
This is not theological sophistication. It is observational faithfulness. He reasons from what happened to him toward what must be true about the one who did it. That pattern — from event to identity — is precisely what John intends readers to do with the entire Gospel.
The parents’ response provides the counter-portrait. They know what happened. They refuse to say it. Social cost overrides honest witness. The Pharisees have no such excuse — they have examined the evidence, questioned the witnesses, and hardened anyway. Their problem is not ignorance but prior commitment to a conclusion.
IV. The Sign’s True End: Worship, Judgment, and the Two Blindnesses (9:35—41)
When Jesus finds the man again, He does not offer a theological debrief. He asks a single question: “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” (v. 35). The man’s response — “Lord, I believe” and subsequent worship — marks the sign’s completion. The healing of physical sight was always aimed at this: the opening of the eyes of the heart toward the one who opened them.
Patristic Voice — Irenaeus of Lyon (c. 130–202)Against Heresies, Book V, Chapter 15 “For what the artificer, the Word, had omitted to form in the womb, He then supplied in public, that the works of God might be manifested in him — showing that it was He Himself who had formed man, who also restores him.” Teacher’s Note: Irenaeus reads the healing as a completion of creation — what was not given at birth is given now. Jesus does not merely repair what was broken; He fulfills what was left undone. This is not restoration theology; it is new-creation theology.
The closing exchange with the Pharisees is among the most searching in the Gospel. Jesus distinguishes between two kinds of blindness: the blindness that knows it cannot see — and therefore remains open to light — and the blindness that claims sight, and in that claim forecloses the possibility of receiving it. The Pharisees’ sin is not that they failed to understand Him. It is that they were certain they already had.
John places both trajectories before the reader and lets the contrast do its work.
Discussion Questions
1. Jesus refuses the disciples’ framing of the blind man’s condition. What assumptions did they bring to the text — and what assumptions do we carry into our own interpretations of suffering?
2. Both Augustine and Irenaeus read the mud as a Christological act tied to creation. What difference does it make whether Jesus is healing a damaged body or completing a work He originally began?
3. The healed man reasons from personal experience toward theological conclusion. Where does that kind of witness have authority — and where does it reach its limits?
4. Jesus describes the Pharisees’ problem not as ignorance but as a certainty that prevents sight. What does that suggest about how we should hold our own theological convictions?
5. The sign ends in worship — not in explanation, argument, or application. What does that tell us about what John wants us to do with what we have just read?
The light of the world does not ask to be explained. He asks to be seen.
On encounter, transformation, and why information alone never changed anyone.
There is a version of Christian faith that is entirely cognitive. You know the facts. You can place the Gospels in historical context. You have read the arguments for the resurrection and found them credible. You are, by any reasonable measure, a person who believes in Jesus. And yet something is missing — you can feel it, even if you cannot name it.
There is another version. It is less tidy and harder to explain to someone who has not experienced it. Something happened — in a garage, in a hospital room, at 3 in the morning with a phone in your hand and nowhere left to go — and you came out of it different. Not fixed, not finished, but changed at a level that ordinary explanation does not reach. You do not just know about Jesus anymore. You have encountered him.
The Gospel of John is careful to preserve this distinction. When Andrew finds his brother Simon after his first encounter with Jesus, he does not say, ‘I have learned a great deal about a remarkable teacher.’ He says, ‘We have found the Messiah’ (John 1:41). The verb matters. Found — not studied, not concluded. There is a discovery quality to genuine encounter with Christ that no amount of information produces.
But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.— John 1:12
This is not an argument against careful thinking about faith. The life of the mind matters enormously, and shallow Christianity does real damage. But intellectual assent and genuine reception are not the same thing. You can know the chemistry of bread without ever being nourished by it.
What changes in a genuine encounter is not primarily your opinion about Jesus. What changes is your posture toward him — and, through that, your posture toward everything else. Fear loses some of its grip. The future looks different. Old patterns that were once impossible to dislodge begin, slowly, to loosen.
This does not happen all at once. The disciples walked with Jesus for three years before they began to understand who they were walking with. Transformation is rarely a single dramatic moment followed by a smooth ascent. It is more often a threshold — something you crossed, even if you cannot remember exactly when — and then a long, daily process of learning what it means to belong to the one you met there.
If you are reading this and the description of encounter feels foreign — if faith has always felt like believing in something you cannot quite touch — that is worth sitting with honestly. The invitation of the Gospel is not primarily to a set of ideas. It is to a person. And persons can be met.
If faith has felt like information without arrival, consider bringing that honestly to God. The Scriptures suggest he is not put off by the request. ‘Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find.’ (Matthew 7:7)
A personal reckoning — not a testimony for public consumption, but an honest accounting for a man who needs to know where he stands before he can lead well
A reflection by John Hargrove April 2026
I. Who I Was — The Hargrove Man Before the Road Was Named
There is a kind of man that East Texas produces with some regularity. Quiet in words. Strong on action. Raised right — by people who respected God, kept their word, showed up when it counted, and did not spend a great deal of time talking about their inner life because their inner life was expressed through what they built and fixed and provided and protected. This is not a criticism. It is a description of something real and genuinely good. The Hargrove men, by what I can understand of them, were this kind of man.
I was formed in that. It gave me things I am still grateful for — a bias toward doing rather than theorizing, a respect for people who carry weight without complaining, a deep instinct that faith is not primarily what you say but what you actually do when things are hard. These are not small gifts.
They also produced in me a particular vulnerability that took decades to recognize. When the interior life is not named, it does not disappear. It goes underground. And underground, it does what unexamined things always do — it shapes behavior from below the waterline, invisible to the person it is shaping, entirely visible to everyone who lives with that person.
I knew the Sunday school stories. Every single one. I could navigate the language of faith, the vocabulary of the church, the expectations of the community around me with complete fluency. I wore that fluency like a garment — not dishonestly exactly, because I believed what I said — but not transparently either, because there was a gap between what I presented and what was actually happening in me that I did not know how to close and was not entirely sure I wanted to.
This is the facade that the Emmaus tradition names directly. Not hypocrisy in the cynical sense. Something more human than that — the instinct to present well, to be seen as put together, to protect the gap between the public self and the private one because the private one feels too unfinished, too complicated, too likely to disappoint if fully seen.
I was a young follower of Jesus who was easily distracted and more easily corrupted than I wanted to admit. Not dramatically. Quietly. The way a man drifts from the center of what is true in him, not through one wide catastrophic choice but through a hundred small ones, each of which seems manageable in the moment and none of which announce themselves as the thing that will eventually nearly take everything down.
The 1990s were the reckoning with what had accumulated below the waterline. The success was real. The drift was real. They coexisted in the same man, and the man did not fully understand how both were possible until the weight of the consequences made understanding unavoidable.
This is who I was. A Hargrove man. Raised by good people. Formed in a tradition that respected God but did not always know how to talk about what was actually happening inside a person. Fluent in the stories, wearing the garment, and carrying something below the waterline that needed to be brought into the light before it took everything with it.
II. Who I Became — Redeemed, Still Wearing the Past, One Step Back and Two Steps Forward
October 13, 2000, did not produce a new man in the sense of replacing the old one. That is not how redemption actually works, whatever some testimonies’ language suggests. What it produced was a man who had been found, rather than a man who had been fixed.
The past does not disappear at the moment of recognition. It becomes honest. The facade does not dissolve — it becomes visible, which is the beginning of being able to put it down. The underground life does not surface all at once — it surfaces slowly, uncomfortably, with resistance, over years of the kind of work that no one sees and that does not make for a clean narrative.
What I became in the years after Walk 51 was a redeemed man still learning to live in the redemption. Full of faith and doubt simultaneously, the way all honest disciples are. Making progress and losing ground and making progress again in the particular rhythm that spiritual formation actually follows in real human lives — not the clean upward trajectory of the inspirational story, but the actual terrain of one step back and two steps forward, sometimes one step back and one step forward, sometimes just standing in place, confused about which direction the road runs.
The licensing in WMF gave my formation the structure and accountability it needed. The eight years between licensing and ordination were not a waiting room — they were a proving ground, and what was being proved was not primarily my capability. What was being proved was whether the man who had been found on Walk 51 would remain found. Whether the recognition that happened in the chapel was going to become a life rather than an experience. Whether the redeemed man was going to keep doing the slow interior work that redemption actually requires or whether he was going to settle for the testimony and leave the transformation unfinished.
I am still in those eight years in some sense. Ordination did not conclude them. Pastoring a church did not conclude them. They are the permanent condition of the honest disciple — the ongoing process of sanctifying grace working in a man who has been found but is still being formed, who has been redeemed but still wears the past, who is genuinely different from who he was and genuinely not yet who he is becoming.
This is not a failure of faith. It is the description of what faith actually is in a human life. The disciples who ran back to Jerusalem in the dark were not finished, people. They were found, people. There is a difference, and honoring that difference is one of the most important things a Spiritual Director can bring to a Walk weekend — because the pilgrims sitting in the Conference Room are not looking for a finished person to show them how it is done. They are looking for a found person who can help them recognize who has been walking beside them all along.
III. Where I Am Now — Looking at the Church and the Community With Clear Eyes
I have been looking at the teachings. The early church. The structure of an institution that has been fighting Romans 3:23 for two thousand years — for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God — and losing and winning and losing again in a cycle that should humble every generation that assumes it has finally gotten it right.
What I see when I look at that history honestly is a church that is perennially tempted to solve the problem of human fallibility by building better systems, drawing clearer lines, establishing more refined hierarchies of spiritual authority — and perennially discovering that the systems and the lines and the hierarchies are populated by the same fallen humans they were designed to manage. Rome did not solve it. The Reformation did not solve it. The Methodist renewal did not solve it. The apostolic movements did not solve it. The non-denominational world is not solving it. Every generation of the church rebuilds the Tower of Babel with better theology and discovers again that the materials are compromised.
This is not cynicism. It is the honest reading of church history that every serious student of it eventually arrives at — and the reading that should produce, in a pastor, not despair but a particular kind of clarity about what the church is actually for and what it cannot do by institutional effort alone.
What I see in the mainline argument about sacramental authority.
The UMC, now the GMC, and the mainline traditions like them are, in significant part, arguing about form over substance. Who can consecrate? Who can baptize? Who holds the keys to the sacramental moments that the tradition identifies as the primary vehicles of grace? The argument is presented as about theological integrity — and there are genuine theological questions embedded in it — but beneath the theological argument lies a much older and more familiar human argument: who is in the elite spiritual class and who is not.
I am not dismissing the question of order. The New Testament takes order seriously. The pastoral epistles take qualifications seriously. The early church took the separation of leadership roles seriously. I take it seriously. GTEC’s standards around sacramental authorization exist for real reasons, and I support them.
But I am also a man who was ordained in an apostolic interdenominational fellowship, who now pastors a standalone church, who has watched the Holy Spirit move with unmistakable power in rooms where no one present would meet the mainline criteria for sacramental authority — and I cannot pretend that the movement of the Spirit I have witnessed respects the boundaries that institutional Christianity has drawn around it.
Where is the priesthood of all believers in all of this? Not as a slogan. Not as a corrective to hierarchy. As a genuine theological question about what the New Testament actually envisions when it describes the community of the redeemed as a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession. What order are we supposed to have — and what is that order in service of?
I do not have a clean answer to this. I have a deep conviction that the answer is more dynamic and more Spirit-responsive than the institutional forms of the church have generally been willing to accommodate — and an equally deep conviction that the freedom of the Spirit is not the same as the absence of accountability, that the priesthood of all believers is not the same as the authority of all individuals, and that the early church’s distributed leadership was characterized by enormous accountability alongside enormous charism.
The tension is real, and it lives inside me as much as it lives in the institutions I am critiquing.
What I see in GTEC.
This is intended to explore a cluster of deeper questions underneath the presenting issues
What is Emmaus actually for? Is Emmaus mainly a place for powerful spiritual moments, or is it a disciplined instrument for renewing already-committed Christians and strengthening the church? That question sits underneath almost everything.
What kind of authority does the model have? Is the model merely a helpful tradition that can be flexed when leaders feel led, or is it a covenant framework meant to restrain personal improvisation for the sake of the whole community?
How does GTEC understand the relationship between Spirit and structure? When something feels spiritually urgent, does that urgency authorize deviation, or does the community believe the Spirit ordinarily works through the structure already given? That is one of the central tensions you are pressing on.
What is the real meaning of covenant fidelity? Is covenant fidelity mainly about obedience to the inherited model, or can it include pastoral judgment in unusual moments without dissolving the model itself? That is the live tension behind Walk 189 and other edge cases.
What is the proper scope of pastoral authority on a weekend? How far may a Spiritual Director, ASDs, Lay Director, or Board Rep go in responding to a real pastoral moment before they are no longer stewarding the weekend but reshaping it?
Who gets to decide what counts as faithful leadership in an exception? Is it the clergy in the moment, the Lay Director, the Board, the Community Spiritual Director, or the manuals? You are really probing where discernment resides when the unexpected happens.
Is Emmaus a ministry of renewal or an event that can drift into becoming a church substitute? Your writing keeps returning to the question of whether Emmaus can accidentally begin to perform functions that belong to the local church, especially in sacramental and pastoral acts.
What does sacramental restraint protect? Why does the model include Communion prominently but not baptism during the weekend? The deeper question is what that restraint is protecting theologically, ecumenically, and pastorally.
What counts as legitimate clergy in GTEC’s actual context? Because the ecclesial world around GTEC is fragmented, you are asking whether inherited assumptions about credentials still work, and, if not, what should replace mere credentialism without collapsing standards.
What is the minimum non-negotiable for presiding at the table? You are exploring whether the key question is denomination, ordination path, sacramental theology, accountability, community standing, or some combination of these.
How should GTEC evaluate clergy in a changed church landscape without becoming either rigid or careless? That is a major thread in your clergy formation papers. You are asking how to be serious without being captive to outdated assumptions, and open without becoming undiscerning.
What does ecumenism actually require now? Is ecumenism just mutual goodwill, or does it also require boundaries so that one tradition’s instincts do not overrun the shared weekend? You are exploring whether openness without discipline eventually ceases to be truly ecumenical.
What is GTEC’s theology of servant leadership? Are leaders there to improvise boldly, or to disappear into faithful stewardship of something larger than themselves? This sits under your repeated concern about anonymous servanthood, training, and discipline.
How much local variation can GTEC carry before it is no longer really following Emmaus? That is the institutional version of the question. At what point does “local flavor” become theological or structural drift?
How should a community handle situations where pastoral compassion and model fidelity appear to collide? This may be the sharpest practical question in all of it. You are not only asking what should have happened, but what kind of community process can hold both compassion and discipline without tearing itself apart.
What does accountability look like when there is disagreement? You are also exploring whether GTEC has the relational and spiritual maturity to process conflict through direct, loving, Matthew 18-shaped communication instead of triangulation, rumor, and factional pressure. This is not just about policy; it is about the spiritual health of the community. Based on your project context and Walk 189 materials, that concern is central.
What kind of formation does GTEC want to produce in clergy and Fourth Day servants? Do you want leaders who are bold improvisers, careful custodians, sacramental stewards, pastoral discerners, or some mature combination of all four? That seems to be one of the deepest formation questions behind your training guide.
What is the real measure of a faithful weekend? Is it that people were moved, that leaders responded boldly, that the schedule was kept, that sacraments were handled rightly, that pilgrims were protected, or that the weekend produced long-term Fourth Day fruit? You seem to be asking what counts most when those goods compete.
If I had to compress all of it into five master questions, they would be these:
What is Emmaus for?
Who has authority to interpret the model in hard moments?
How does GTEC hold Spirit and structure together without betraying either?
What standards actually matter for clergy and sacramental leadership now?
How can the community stay faithful without becoming either rigid, reactive, or factional?
And underneath even those, there may be one deepest question:
Can GTEC be a spiritually alive Emmaus community that is also disciplined enough to submit itself to a form it did not invent?
I see a community that is carrying something genuinely valuable — the Emmaus model, the lay-clergy partnership, the theology of grace, the pattern of Luke 24 — while simultaneously struggling with what every community of humans struggles with. The staffing challenges. The unwillingness to speak the authentic truth in love to each other. The board meetings where Jesus is presumably present and the behavior is sometimes difficult to distinguish from any other organizational meeting where humans are managing competing interests and protecting established positions.
I see the new pastors/4th day (‘how does the board override the Spirit’) situation as a symptom of something larger than itself. Whatever the specific facts — and I do not have all of them — what new pastors/4th day (‘how does the board override the Spirit’) appears to be expressing is the feeling of being managed rather than pastored, controlled rather than discerned, processed by an institutional mechanism rather than encountered by a community. That feeling may or may not be accurate in its specifics. But it is real as a feeling, and it is naming something real about the gap between what Emmaus claims to be and what it sometimes actually is in its organizational life.
The Holy Spirit does not move by board resolution. But the board is also not the enemy of the Spirit — it is the organizational form through which a community seeks to create the conditions in which the Spirit can move consistently and safely, for pilgrims, team members, the clergy pool, and the broader church the community serves. Both of those things are true simultaneously and the tension between them does not resolve into a clean answer.
I see the past trust issues — the decades of argument, the 4th-day conflicts, the pushback against appropriate change, the loyalty to forms that have outlived their function — as the natural accumulation of what happens in any community that has been together long enough to have a history. History is both the community’s greatest asset and its most persistent liability. The people who were there when something significant happened carry it as identity. The people who arrive after carry it as mythology. The community that cannot distinguish between the two cannot change when change is necessary, and it cannot recognize when the proposed change is actually the kind that will take something essential away rather than add what is needed.
I see the cultural shifts pressing on local churches as something GTEC is not yet fully reckoning with. The congregations that send pilgrims to GTEC are being reshaped by forces — demographic, technological, economic, social — that the Emmaus model was not designed to address and that the community’s current leadership culture does not always have language for. The renewal that Emmaus offers is real. It is also insufficient on its own to address what is happening to local churches in East and Southeast Texas right now. Renewed disciples returning to declining congregations, with diminishing cultural authority in their communities, need more than the Fourth Day framework has traditionally offered them.
IV. The Future — What I Believe Is Possible and What I Believe Is Required
I am not a pessimist about any of this. I say that as a man who has read the history honestly, seen the institutional failures up close, and carries the specific scars of having been found on a road I was walking in the wrong direction on. Pessimism is not my conclusion. Something more demanding than pessimism is my conclusion.
What I believe about GTEC’s future is this:
The community will be as healthy as its willingness to practice what it preaches. An Emmaus community that teaches sanctifying grace and does not embody it in its board meetings is not a hypocritical community — it is a human one. But it is also a community that asks pilgrims to receive something the community itself is not fully inhabiting, and that gap eventually becomes visible to the people in the room, costing the community credibility and vitality over time.
The willingness to speak authentic truth in love — which Emmaus asks of pilgrims and team members, and which the community’s own health requires — is the discipline that most needs cultivation in GTEC’s leadership culture right now. Not as a management technique. As a spiritual practice. As the embodiment of the grace we teach.
The new pastors/4th day (‘how does the board override the Spirit’) situation, whatever its specific resolution, needs to be approached pastorally rather than institutionally. A person expressing a sense of betrayal by the community is not primarily a board governance problem. It is a pastoral emergency, which does not mean the person is right about everything they claim, but that the primary response needs to be human contact and honest conversation rather than procedural management. If GTEC handles it institutionally, it will win the argument and lose the person. If it handles it pastorally, it may not resolve the structural question immediately but it will demonstrate that the community is what it says it is.
The sacramental question — who can do what and on what authority — needs to be held with both clarity and humility. The standards exist for real reasons. They also cannot become a hedge that protects institutional comfort rather than theological integrity. The CSD and the board together need to be able to distinguish between standards that protect the mission and those that have become organizational habits that protect themselves.
The cultural reckoning is coming whether GTEC engages it proactively or not. The communities that are sending pilgrims to GTEC in ten years will look different from the communities sending pilgrims today — different demographics, different pressures, different understandings of authority and community, and what the church is for. An Emmaus community that does not develop the capacity to understand and respond to those shifts will find itself renewing disciples for a church culture that no longer exists in the same form.
What does this mean for me personally?
I am not a disinterested observer of any of this. I am a man with a specific history — the Hargrove formation, the facade years, the drifting decades, the Walk 51 recognition, the apostolic ordination, the standalone church, the GTEC investment — who is trying to figure out what faithful service looks like at this specific moment in this specific community.
The training document I am building is not just a project. It is an expression of what I believe the community needs and what I am able, given where I have been and what I have learned, to offer it. It is also a form of the accountability I was talking about — submission to something larger than my own vision and preferences, the willingness to build something that serves the community rather than the community serving my need to build.
The conversations with various SDs are not just a data-gathering exercise. It is a practice of the partnership that the Emmaus model teaches — genuine collaboration among people with different gifts, histories, wounds, and angles of vision, none of whom can see the whole thing alone.
The work of becoming a better WSD and ASD is the ongoing work of becoming a more honest version of the found man — more willing to be seen in the weakness that makes pastoral presence possible, more willing to hold the space rather than fill it, more willing to trust the model and the community and the God who was on the road before any of us arrived.
This is where I am. In the middle of the road that began in a child’s bedroom and ran through the decades and arrived at a chapel, it has not stopped.
Still being found. Still finding. Still believing that the stranger on the road is the risen Christ — and that he has been there longer than any of us have known what to do with that.
The future is His. The work is ours. And somewhere in the tension between those two sentences is exactly where the Emmaus community has always lived, and where it will live as long as it is honest about both.
“Did not our hearts burn within us?”
Yes. Still. That has not changed.
That will not change.
John Hargrove Walk 51 Table of the Living Word October 2000
There’s something most of us carry into a room like this that we don’t always have a name for.
It’s that pull — where part of you knows what grace looks like, and part of you knows what truth looks like, and you’re not always sure how to hold both of them at the same time without dropping one.
We’ve all dropped one. Most of us have dropped both.
Jesus didn’t. And John’s Gospel opens with that as the first thing it wants you to know about Him.
John 1:14
BSB “The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
ESV “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
NASB “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us; and we saw His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
Not half of each. Full of both. At the same time. For the same people. In the same moment.
That’s either the most comforting thing you’ve heard this morning — or the most convicting. Maybe both.
So watch what He does with it. Because He doesn’t leave it as a theological statement. He walks it right into people’s lives.
A man who came at night with questions he wasn’t ready to ask in public. A woman alone at a well at the wrong time of day. A man who’d been lying beside a pool for thirty-eight years waiting for somebody to notice him.
Same thing every time.
He showed up. Directly. To the person. In the actual moment they were already in.
I. He Shows Up (John 1–8)
Nicodemus was a Pharisee. A ruler of the Jews. He knew the law better than most people in Jerusalem — had studied it, taught it, built his whole life around it.
And he came to Jesus in the middle of the night.
Which tells you something. Whatever he was carrying, he wasn’t ready to carry it where people could see him carrying it. So he came in the dark, with his questions, to a man he wasn’t sure what to make of yet.
Jesus didn’t make him feel foolish for that. He didn’t say ‘come back when you’re ready to be seen.’ He met him right there — in the dark, at night, with the full weight of truth.
“You must be born again.” — John 3:7
That’s not a soft answer. That’s not a managed one. That’s grace opening a door that truth walks straight through.
The woman at the well was alone at midday. People who draw water alone at midday are usually alone for a reason. She had five husbands behind her and a sixth man she wasn’t married to, and she had learned — the way you learn things that cost you — to keep her distance from people who asked too many questions.
Jesus asked her for water.
Just that. Simple. Like He needed something from her. And then He gave her a conversation she wasn’t expecting — about living water and worship and the kind of life she hadn’t dared to think was still available to her.
And then — when the moment was right — He told her everything she ever did.
Not to expose her. Not to win the argument. Because the truth was the only thing that was going to reach her where she actually was.
She went back into town and told everybody. ‘Come see a man who told me everything I ever did.’ That is not the response of a woman who felt condemned. That is the response of a woman who felt found.
The man at Bethesda had been lying beside that pool for thirty-eight years.
Thirty-eight years of watching other people get there first. Thirty-eight years of being close to something that could help him and never being able to get to it. Thirty-eight years of people stepping around him on their way to somewhere else.
Jesus walked past everybody else there and stopped in front of him.
John 5:6
BSB “When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had already been there a long time, He asked him, “Do you want to get well?”’
ESV “When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?”’
NASB “When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he had already been in that condition for a long time, He said to him, “Do you want to get well?”’
Not a program. Not a referral. A direct question to one specific man in his specific situation on that specific day.
Every time. That’s the thing you start to notice when you read John slow enough to let it settle. It’s not a pattern Jesus announces. He just lives it. He doesn’t send word ahead. He doesn’t wait for better conditions. He doesn’t work through people who know the right people.
He shows up. Directly. To the person. In the actual moment they’re already in.
And He brings the same two things with Him every single time.
Grace. And truth. Both of them. All the way.
Which brings us to John 8. Because everything you just watched Him do — with Nicodemus, with the woman at the well, with the man nobody else stopped for — all of it comes to a single point in one scene. One woman. One crowd. One moment where grace and truth aren’t just present at the same time — they’re being tested against each other in front of everybody.
And how Jesus handles it is going to tell us something about how we’re supposed to handle each other.
II. The Woman (John 8)
They didn’t bring her because they cared about her.
You can feel that in the text. She’s not a person to them in this moment — she’s a situation. Something they can use. They’ve caught her in the act, which means they were watching for it, which means this was never really about her.
They put her in the middle. That’s the word John uses. In the midst. Surrounded. Nowhere to go. And they address Jesus like the whole thing is a theological question — Moses commanded us that such should be stoned. What do you say?
They were right about what she had done. That’s what made it such a clean trap. The law was on their side. The evidence was present. The crowd was watching. All Jesus had to do was agree or disagree and they had Him either way.
He stooped down and wrote in the dirt.
We don’t know what He wrote. John doesn’t tell us. Scholars have been arguing about it for two thousand years and they’re no closer to an answer than they were at the start. I’ve come to think that might be the point — that what happened next didn’t depend on what was written. It depended on what was said.
But notice the stooping first.
In a room full of people performing — accusers performing outrage, crowd performing attention, a woman performing invisibility just trying to survive the next few minutes — Jesus stopped performing entirely. He got low. He slowed down. He didn’t match the energy in the room. He didn’t rise to meet the drama.
He just waited.
When He stood back up He didn’t address her. He addressed them.
John 8:7
BSB “When they continued to question Him, He straightened up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her.”’
ESV “And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.”’
NASB “But when they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.”’
One sentence. And then He stooped back down and kept writing.
He didn’t watch them leave. He didn’t stand there with His arms crossed waiting to see what they’d do. He gave them a way out that didn’t require them to be publicly humiliated on their way through the door. Which is itself an act of grace — extended to the people who came there to trap Him.
They left. One by one. Oldest first.
The ones who had lived the longest understood fastest what that sentence meant. Because the longer you live, the more you accumulate. The more you know about your own history. The more you understand that the stone in your hand has some weight to answer for before you let it go.
Until there was nobody left but her.
John 8:10–11
BSB “Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are your accusers? Has no one condemned you?” “No one, Lord,” she answered. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Now go and leave your life of sin.”’
ESV “Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.”’
NASB “Straightening up, Jesus said to her, “Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on do not sin any longer.”’
Grace first. Truth second. In that order. Both present. Neither one cancelled by the other.
He didn’t lower the standard. The go and sin no more is real — it’s not a footnote, not a courtesy, not a soft landing after the hard part. He means it. The truth is still the truth. What she was doing was still what it was.
But the grace came first. And the grace came from the only person in that room who actually had the standing to withhold it.
Everyone else left because they couldn’t throw the stone. He stayed because He could have — and chose not to.
I want to stay here a minute. Because this scene has a way of flattening out when we read it too fast — turning into a lesson about not judging people, or a proof text for grace, or a warm story about Jesus being kind.
It’s more than that.
What happened in that room is that every possible way of handling a hard situation showed up at once — and Jesus refused every single one of them except the right one.
The accusers had truth. And they used it as a weapon.
The crowd had presence. And they used it as cover.
The culture outside that door would have said let it go, don’t make it an issue, why stir things up.
Jesus didn’t pick any of those. He held grace and truth together at the same time, for the same woman, in the same breath — and He did it by showing up directly, in the actual moment she was in, and speaking to her like she was a person who still had somewhere to go.
Go. That word again.
Not ‘you’re dismissed.’ Not ‘you’re forgiven, now disappear.’
Go — as in, there is a life still ahead of you. There is a path. It’s straight. Walk it.
I’ve been in rooms where the easier thing got chosen instead of the right thing. Where truth showed up without grace and left damage behind. Where grace showed up without truth and left people exactly where they were. Where the hardest and most necessary thing — showing up directly, to the person, in the actual moment — got quietly set aside for something that felt safer and cost less.
I imagine you have too.
That’s not a failure unique to anybody in this room. It’s the oldest pattern there is — reaching for anything except the thing that requires us to be fully present, fully honest, and fully willing to hold both grace and truth at the same time.
Adam and Eve — Reached for control instead of trusting God, then hid rather than face truth and grace.
King Saul — Chose partial obedience and justification instead of honest surrender to God’s truth.
King David — Tried to cover sin to avoid truth, then found restoration only when he fully confessed.
Jonah — Fled rather than hold God’s truth about sin and His grace toward sinners at the same time.
Peter — Avoided truth under pressure to protect himself instead of standing honestly with Jesus.
Rich Young Ruler — Walked away because he wanted grace without accepting the costly truth.
Pontius Pilate — Recognized truth but chose safety over acting on it.
Jesus Christ — Perfectly held grace and truth together without compromise or avoidance.
Jesus didn’t reach for anything else.
And that’s what makes the next thing He says — not in John 8, but in Matthew 18 — land the way it does.
III. The Straight Path (Matthew 18:15–17)
When Jesus talks about what to do when a brother sins against you, He doesn’t start with a committee.
He doesn’t start with a process. He doesn’t start with a policy or a procedure or a meeting about the meeting. He starts with a single word that has more weight in it than we usually give it credit for.
Matthew 18:15
BSB “If your brother sins against you, go and confront him privately. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over.”
ESV “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother.”
NASB “Now if your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private; if he listens to you, you have gained your brother.”
Go yourself. First. Alone. To them.
Not to their neighbor. Not to somebody who knows somebody who might bring it up eventually. Not in a group chat. Not in a hallway conversation that starts with ‘I’m just asking for prayer but’ — which we all know isn’t really a prayer request, it’s information moving in a direction it wasn’t supposed to move.
Go. Yourself. First. Alone.
That word does something to us if we let it. Because it removes every option that feels easier than the right one.
It removes the option of waiting until it resolves itself — which it almost never does. It removes the option of mentioning it to someone who’ll understand — which feels like grace but is usually just distance wearing grace’s clothes. It removes the option of letting it become a thing that everybody knows about except the person it’s actually about.
Jesus isn’t being harsh here. He’s being merciful. Because He knows what happens when we don’t go. He knows what a thing becomes when it travels sideways through a community instead of moving directly between the people it belongs to. He’s seen it. He knows the damage.
So He says go. Because going is the only thing that has a chance of getting somewhere worth going.
The goal isn’t to win. Matthew 18 is clear about that. The goal is stated plainly right there in the text.
“If he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother.”
Gained. Not defeated. Not proven right. Not gotten an apology.
Gained.
That’s a word about restoration. About bringing somebody back to where they belong. About a relationship that was broken being made whole again — not perfectly, not without cost, but whole enough to keep walking together.
That’s what the straight path is for. Not to punish. Not to establish who was right. To restore.
And here’s what I want you to notice. Because it’s easy to read Matthew 18 as a conflict resolution policy and miss what it actually is.
It’s a description of what it looks like to be a person who has already done something on the inside before they do anything on the outside.
Because you cannot go — not the way Jesus means go — if you’re still carrying the stone. You cannot walk toward somebody with grace and truth at the same time if you’ve already decided what the verdict is before you get there. You cannot gain your brother if what you really want is to be right about him.
Going the way Matthew 18 means going requires you to have already set something down. The stone. The verdict. The need to be vindicated before the conversation even starts.
The woman’s accusers couldn’t go because they were still holding their stones. They could accuse. They could perform. They could stand in a crowd and feel righteous. But they couldn’t go — not toward her, not toward Jesus, not toward anything that required them to arrive empty-handed.
Jesus went. Every time. Empty-handed except for grace and truth.
That’s the pattern. That’s the path. And Matthew 18 is Jesus saying — now you do it.
This isn’t easy. I’m not going to stand here and tell you it is.
There are conversations most of us have been avoiding for longer than we’d like to admit. Situations we’ve been handling sideways because handling them directly felt like more than we had. People we’ve talked around instead of talked to — not out of malice, but out of the very human instinct to protect ourselves from the discomfort of a hard moment.
That instinct is understandable. It’s also exactly what produces factions instead of families. Distance instead of restoration. A community that looks fine on the outside and is quietly fracturing on the inside.
Jesus knew that. Which is why He didn’t just model the straight path in John — He named it in Matthew. Go. First. Alone. Directly.
Because the straight path doesn’t find you. You have to choose it.
Close
Jesus is still doing what He did in John 4 and John 5 and John 8.
He’s still showing up. Directly. To specific people. In the actual moment they’re already in. Not waiting for better conditions. Not sending somebody else. Not working through intermediaries. Just showing up — with grace and with truth, both of them, all the way — to whoever is standing in front of Him.
And He’s still asking the same question He asked that man beside the pool.
Not in those exact words, maybe. But the same question underneath the words.
“Do you want to be made well?”
That question has a way of finding the places in us we’ve been managing instead of dealing with. The conversations we’ve been having around somebody instead of with them. The stone we’ve been holding so long we’ve stopped noticing the weight of it. The straight path we can see clearly enough — we just haven’t taken the first step onto it yet.
He’s not waiting for us to have it figured out before He shows up. He never did. Nicodemus didn’t have it figured out. The woman at the well didn’t have it figured out. The man at Bethesda had thirty-eight years of evidence that figuring it out on his own wasn’t working.
Jesus showed up anyway. Every time. To the actual person. In the actual moment.
That’s where this is.
The grace is real. The truth is real. The path is straight.
He never lowered the standard. He never withdrew the mercy.
I remember standing out at a metering station back in 2007, somewhere off a caliche road you wouldn’t find unless you already knew where you were going. East Texas co-op site. Quiet place. The kind where you can hear the wind before you see it.
That radio link we were depending on had been put in sometime in the late 90s. I ran the path profile right there in the truck. Same story I’ve seen a hundred times—Fresnel barely clearing, fade margin just enough to make you feel okay until you’re not. A couple of other transmitters on the same tower are already stepping on each other a little.
Nothing broken. Nothing dramatic. Just fragile in a quiet kind of way.
That same setup is still out there today in more places than folks want to admit. Same sub-GHz radios. Same serial cables run through what was supposed to be “temporary.” Same passwords, nobody ever changed. Same remote access tools because the integrator lives two hours away, and the operator’s got another job to get to.
And honestly, that’s not carelessness. That’s reality.
Those systems were built in a world where isolation was the security model. That world’s gone now. But the systems didn’t change with it.
You hear a lot about checklists and compliance and inventory—and they’re not wrong. You do need to know what you’ve got. But the real issue I keep running into isn’t just knowing it exists.
It’s whether it was ever built to handle what it’s actually dealing with.
Weather fade. Trees growing up into your path. Interference from somebody else hanging gear on the same structure. One cable takes the whole system down if it fails.
That’s not cybersecurity. That’s just telling the truth about the system.
And if I’m being honest, that same pattern shows up in life, too.
We’ve got all this technology now that makes it feel like we’re in control. But something underneath is getting thinner. Everything is constant—alerts, messages, noise—and it keeps you in that problem-solving mode all the time. You’re always thinking, always fixing, always responding.
But you’re not really resting and not really connecting. Not really present.
I’ve lived that.
The work itself is good. Keeping water moving. Keeping systems talking and helping communities function. That part matters.
But it can also take more than it’s supposed to.
I’ve had seasons where I carried responsibility like it all depended on me—stayed up too late chasing one more improvement. Pushed through things I should’ve stopped and grieved. Kept quiet when I should’ve said I needed help.
It builds up. Quietly. Faith, at least the way I’ve come to understand it, doesn’t remove that weight. It puts it back where it belongs.
You weren’t meant to carry all of it. You weren’t meant to run without stopping.
You weren’t meant to pretend nothing’s been lost along the way.
There’s a reason Scripture emphasizes rest, sharing burdens, and strength in weakness-these aren’t just ideas, but a divine design for our well-being.
It’s not a theory. Its design.
So now I’m trying—slowly—to live that out.
Do the work right. Engineer it honestly. Document it so the next guy isn’t guessing. Don’t chase every new thing just because it’s new.
But also close the laptop when it’s time. Let the system be what it is for a few hours. Say out loud when something’s heavy instead of burying it. Trust that I’m not the one holding everything together.
That old radio link mindset still sticks with me. You harden what you can. You document it better. You improve it where possible.
But at the end of the day, you’re not the source of the system’s life. You’re just a steward of it.
And that applies just as much to the work as it does to everything else.
So for anybody out there carrying similar weight—
Do the inventory. Fix what you can fix. Write it down so it lasts.
But don’t forget to rest.
Don’t skip the grief.
Don’t try to carry it alone.
There’s more to this than uptime and performance.
The work matters. But it’s not where the meaning comes from.
That part comes from walking it out—steady, faithful, with other people, and under grace.
Today I find myself remembering my son, Joshua Blake Hargrove.
Joshua was born into our lives with a presence that filled every room. At 6’4”, people noticed him immediately, but what they stayed for was his heart. He carried a joy that was real, not forced. He made people feel seen, welcomed, and valued. There was something in him that drew others in.
On June 22, 2002, at 12:50 a.m., his life on this earth ended suddenly in a car wreck. There are no words that fully explain what that kind of loss does to a father. Time moves forward, but moments like this remind me that love does not fade, and neither does memory.
What stands out even more as the years pass is who Joshua was becoming.
Not long before he died, he told his friends he wanted to serve Jesus. That matters deeply to me. In a world full of distractions and competing voices, my son was turning his heart toward Christ. That was not something we put on him in that moment. It was something God was doing in him.
And in a way only God can orchestrate, Joshua’s life did not end that night.
He left behind more than memories. He left a path.
There was a youth Bible study connected to his life that we began to shepherd after his passing. What we thought would be a small act of faithfulness became a 20-year journey. Through that ministry, we were connected to hundreds of young people. We walked with them, learned from them, prayed with them, and watched God work in their lives.
That journey changed us.
It led his mother and me into places we never expected. It shaped our calling. It is part of what led us to become licensed and ordained pastors. Looking back, I can see clearly that God used Joshua’s life to open a door of ministry that has impacted far more people than we could have imagined.
That is not how a father plans a legacy for his son.
But it is how God redeems what we cannot understand.
Joshua’s witness was not just in what he said at the end, but in how he lived. His kindness, his joy, his presence, and his growing desire to follow Jesus continue to speak. His life still echoes in the lives of those he touched and in the work that continues today.
I miss him. There is not a day that passes that I do not think about what could have been.
But I am grateful.
Grateful for the years we had.
Grateful for the man he was becoming.
Grateful that his life pointed toward Jesus.
Grateful that his story did not end in the darkness of that night, but continues in the light of what God has done since.
In 2007 I stood at a remote metering station for an East Texas electric cooperative, eight miles down a caliche road from the nearest paved highway. The 900 MHz radio link feeding telemetry back to the control center had been installed in the late 1990s. I remember leaning against the chain-link fence that afternoon, path-profile sketch in hand, praying quietly for wisdom. The Fresnel zone clearance was marginal. The link budget gave us a fade margin that was “good enough for government work.” Co-site interference from two other transmitters on the shared water-tower mount was already measurable. None of it was dramatic. It was simply the quiet fragility I had come to expect after two decades in the field.
That same 1990s-era radio technology is still the backbone for far too many rural water systems in 2026. The same unlicensed sub-GHz links, the same RS-232 cables run through “temporary” conduit fittings, the same factory-default passwords on the web interfaces. The SCADA password is still written on a Post-it note taped to the server rack. The remote access tool is still TeamViewer or AnyDesk because the integrator is two hours away and the operator has a day job. None of this is negligence. It is rational adaptation to real operational constraints. The systems were geographically and technically isolated when they were built. The threat model changed. The trust model has not caught up.
This is the field reality the federal checklists rarely name. The CISA/EPA guidance is right: asset inventory is foundational. Before you can protect it, you must know it exists. But the real gap is not in the inventory. It is in whether those assets—the radios, the PLCs, the unlicensed backhaul links—are engineered to survive the conditions they actually face: weather fade, vegetation growth, shared tower interference, and the single-point-of-failure cable runs that operators have lived with for decades. The engineering toolbox—RF path profiles, link budget validation, co-site interference assessment, sub-GHz band baseline documentation—is not cybersecurity tooling. It is infrastructure truth-telling, and it is part of the sacred stewardship God has placed in our hands.
Technology has a way of promising control while quietly stealing meaning.
I see this in the field, and I see it in the wider culture. Two recent conversations with Harvard professor Arthur Brooks on the meaning of life in an age of emptiness stayed with me. He described how the attention economy and always-on technology push us into the left hemisphere of the brain—the side of tasks, analysis, and simulation—while starving the right hemisphere, the home of mystery, meaning, and real human connection. We scroll, we simulate relationships, we feed questions into AI that can never answer the coherence, purpose, and significance questions that actually matter. Life starts to feel like waiting in an airport lounge with no flight information.
My work is not exempt. The same radios and networks that keep water flowing and substations communicating can become 24/7 demands that blur the line between the system and the self. The perfectionism that once served excellence in design now imprisons me in the small hours, reviewing one more link budget. The weight of responsibility I have carried—for cooperatives, water districts, pipeline operators, and communities—has sometimes felt like the burden I was never meant to carry alone. I have internalized stress until it became heavy silence. I have pushed through grief over lost seasons and changing technology landscapes without giving mourning its due.
Faith does not offer escape from this weight. It offers integration.
The prayer journey I have been walking these past months has become my daily anchor in the field. It names the very patterns I see in both my work and my soul:
The weight I was never meant to carry alone — Galatians 6:2 reminds me that the law of Christ is mutual. I am learning to let operators, vendors, and fellow engineers share the load instead of pretending one licensed PE can hold every system together.
The Sabbath I have forgotten — God built rest into creation for a reason. Closing the laptop on the seventh day is an act of trust that the pumps and meters will still hold.
The grief that has not been given its due — I have mourned the slow obsolescence of systems I helped design, the contractors who have retired, and the simpler days when isolation was protection.
The perfection that imprisons — “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). I now see marginal fade margins and legacy radios not as personal failures but as places where God’s strength can shine.
The help I cannot ask for — I am learning to speak the stress out loud to trusted brothers in Christ before it settles into my bones.
The silence that swallows — Acknowledging sin, fatigue, and limitation before the Lord breaks the isolation.
The compassion that has run dry — The Good Shepherd still makes me lie down in green pastures and leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul so I can keep stewarding what He has entrusted to me.
Scripture does not promise that the radio link will never fail or that the threat model will simplify. It promises that in Christ “all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). The same Lord who upholds the universe upholds the fragile 900 MHz link and the operator who depends on it. Faithful engineering requires the same disciplines that faithful living requires: rigorous truth-seeking without overconfidence, documentation that outlasts any one contractor or operator, restraint that refuses to chase novelty at the expense of reliability, and the humility to ask for help before the single point of failure becomes a system-wide outage. It means designing for the real environment—shared towers, unlicensed bands, legacy systems from the 1990s that still work—while refusing to let the technology define the meaning of the days.
I am learning, slowly, to set down what was never mine to carry alone. To close the laptop on the Sabbath and trust that the pumps and meters will hold. To speak the stress out loud instead of letting it settle into the bones. To let the Shepherd lead me beside quiet waters even when the work feels urgent.
The radio link from 2007 is still there in spirit—updated, hardened where possible, documented now—but the deeper resilience comes from remembering that we are not the source of the system’s life. We are stewards of it, held by the One who never sleeps or slumbers.
To every operator, engineer, and leader carrying similar weight: inventory the assets. Harden the links. Document the baselines. But do not forget to rest. Do not forget to mourn what has changed. Do not forget to ask for help. And above all, do not forget that the meaning of this work—and of our lives—will never be found in the left-brain simulation of perfect uptime. It is found in the right-brain mystery of faithfulness lived in real time, with real people, under real grace.
The Shepherd is still leading. The line is still being held. And in Him, that is enough.
The Founders called this republic an experiment. Madison said so explicitly. Hamilton opened the Federalist Papers asking whether societies of men are capable of governing themselves by “reflection and choice” — or whether they are forever destined to be governed by “accident and force.”
That question has never been permanently answered. It gets re-answered by each generation’s behavior.
Here is the experiment. Four variables. Be honest with yourself about all four.
Variable 1: The Constitution was built to change — but HOW you change it matters.
Article V provides two deliberate pathways for amendment. The Founders used them immediately — the Bill of Rights was ratified within three years of the Constitution itself. They were not building a frozen monument. They were building a process. Madison wrote that the greatness of the American people is that they “have not suffered a blind veneration for the past.”
The experiment: When you want the Constitution to mean something different, do you use the process — or do you use power to bypass the process? One is self-government. The other is the thing self-government was designed to prevent.
Variable 2: The Founders themselves were never unanimous — and they knew it.
Three delegates refused to sign the Constitution. Rhode Island boycotted the convention entirely. Ratification was close and contentious in nearly every state. Loyalists — perhaps a third of the colonial population — were never part of the founding consensus at all. Hamilton acknowledged in Federalist 1 that “wise and good men” would be found on both sides of the ratifying debate, and that honest opposition would “spring from sources blameless at least, if not respectable.”
The experiment: If the Founders — who had fought a war together, knew each other personally, and shared enormous common ground — could not achieve unanimity, why do we treat the other side’s disagreement as evidence of bad faith rather than honest difference?
Variable 3: Facts versus narrative — the one problem the Founders did not solve.
Madison’s great structural cure for faction was the extended republic — the idea that geographic distance and diversity would prevent any single passion from simultaneously inflaming the entire country. A pamphlet in Virginia took weeks to reach Massachusetts. The friction of distance cooled factional contagion.
That friction is gone. Every citizen now receives the same emotional signal simultaneously, curated for maximum reaction. Madison in Federalist 63 wrote that the Senate’s purpose was to protect the people “against their own temporary errors and delusions” until “reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind.” He assumed truth would regain authority, given time and space.
The experiment: What happens to a republic designed around deliberation when the information environment is specifically engineered to prevent deliberation — and when “news” and “fact” have become functionally indistinguishable to millions of citizens? This is the one variable the Founders anticipated but could not design around. It is ours to solve or to fail.
Variable 4: The permanent political class — the pig at the trough problem.
Hamilton in Federalist 1 identified the most dangerous class of men in any republic: those who “aggrandize themselves by the confusions of their country” — men whose personal interest is permanently tied to the perpetuation of conflict rather than its resolution. He was describing the career politician before the career politician existed as a recognizable type.
The Constitution sets no term limits on Congress. The Founders debated this and chose not to impose them, trusting the election mechanism to rotate citizens in and out. What they did not anticipate was a professional class for whom holding office is the vocation — not a temporary sacrifice of a productive citizen, but a permanent extraction from the republic’s resources.
Madison in Federalist 47 called the accumulation of all power in the same hands “the very definition of tyranny.” A legislator who has held office for thirty years, whose personal wealth has multiplied through that tenure, who has converted public power into private benefit through earmarks and special interests — is not serving the republic. By Madison’s own definition, they are the faction.
The experiment: Does this apply only to the career politicians on the other side — or does it apply equally to the ones you keep re-electing?
The control variable — the one that determines whether the experiment succeeds or fails:
Orwell noticed, in Animal Farm, that the pigs did not become what they replaced by dramatic revolution. They became it gradually, by the slow logic of occupying power long enough that the distinction between serving the farm and owning the farm disappeared.
Hamilton’s question — reflection and choice, or accident and force — is not asked once at the founding and answered forever. It is asked again every time a citizen decides whether to apply their principles consistently or only when convenient.
The republic is not a partisan inheritance. It was built by people who disagreed profoundly, on a framework designed to contain disagreement without destroying the disagreers.
It will be kept — or lost — by whether we can still do the same.
Sources: Federalist No. 1 (Hamilton), Federalist No. 10, 47, 51, 63 (Madison) · Article V, United States Constitution · Madison, Federalist 14 on constitutional change · Hamilton, Federalist 1 on the permanent political class
What Happened, What It Means, and Why the Early Church Cared So Much
Source of Old Faith Church · March 2026 · Class Overview
Part One · What John 6 Is About
John 6 opens with a crowd following Jesus across a lake because they saw him heal people. He feeds more than five thousand of them with five small loaves of bread and two fish, with twelve baskets of food left over. That night his disciples set out by boat, and Jesus walks across the water to meet them. The next day the crowd finds him on the other side, confused about how he got there.
Then Jesus starts talking — and the conversation gets difficult fast.
He tells them plainly that they are only looking for him because they got a free meal. He tells them not to work for food that spoils, but for food that lasts forever. When they ask what that food is, he says: it is himself. ‘I am the bread of life,’ he says. ‘Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’
The crowd pushes back. They know his parents. He is from Nazareth. How can he say he ‘came down from heaven’?
Jesus does not back down. He goes further. He says that no one can even come to him unless God draws them first — that coming to him is not something people manage on their own. And then he says something that shocks everyone in the room: unless you eat his flesh and drink his blood, you have no life in you.
People start leaving. Even many of his closer followers say this teaching is too hard. By the end of the chapter, the crowd has thinned dramatically. Jesus turns to the twelve disciples and asks: do you want to leave too? Peter speaks for the group: ‘Lord, where else would we go? You have the words of eternal life.’
Part Two · The Three Questions the Chapter Forces
1. Does God decide who comes to Jesus — or do people decide for themselves?
This is the question your class landed on first, and it is a real one. Jesus says in verse 44 that no one can come to him unless the Father draws them. He says it again in verse 65. That sounds like God is in control of who responds.
But earlier in the same chapter — and throughout John’s Gospel — Jesus invites, welcomes, and appeals to people to believe. He says in John 3:16 that God so loved the world. The same chapter contains both things.
The honest answer is that John holds both without resolving them. God moves first. People still respond or refuse. The class’s observation was exactly right: when someone begins seeking God, that seeking is itself evidence that God is already at work in them. The two are not opposites — they are sequential. God moves; the person responds to that movement.
This question has been debated by serious, faithful Christians for fifteen centuries. It has not been settled because the text holds both edges without letting go of either.
2. What does it mean to eat his flesh and drink his blood?
This language caused people to walk away in the first century, and it still makes readers uncomfortable today. The class was right to notice it sounds extreme.
It helps to remember that John’s Gospel is full of this kind of picture language. Jesus is also described as living water, as light, as the door, as the vine. None of those are meant to be taken in a flat, physical way. ‘Eating his flesh and drinking his blood’ is the most intense version of a consistent pattern: Jesus is the source of life, and receiving him has to go all the way down.
It is picture language for total dependence. To eat and drink is to take something inside you that keeps you alive. Jesus is saying: that is what I am to you, spiritually. There is no life that does not come through me.
Whether this also connects to the Lord’s Supper is a question Christians have answered differently for two thousand years. What is clear from the chapter itself is that the primary meaning is about receiving Christ through faith — trusting him so completely that sustaining life apart from him becomes unthinkable.
3. Why did so many people leave?
Because they had come for something else. The crowd followed Jesus across a lake because they had eaten free bread the day before. They were hoping for more of what they already understood: provision, healing, maybe a leader who would deal with the Romans.
What Jesus offered was different in kind, not just in degree. He was not offering a better version of what they already wanted. He was reorienting their wants altogether. And that is a much harder ask.
Their leaving was not a failure of Jesus’s communication. It was a disclosure of their motivation. The teaching did not drive them away — it revealed why they had come.
Peter’s response is the counterpoint to all of it: ‘Where else would we go?’ Not ‘I understand everything you said.’ Not ‘This all makes sense to me now.’ Just — there is nowhere else. This is the only place where words reach all the way to eternal life. That is enough to stay.
Part Three · What Five Early Christians Saw in This Chapter
Within a generation of John’s Gospel being written, Christian leaders were already wrestling deeply with it. Five of them are worth knowing by name — not because they had all the answers, but because the questions they faced help us understand why this chapter matters so much.
Ignatius of Antioch (died around AD 107)
Ignatius was a bishop in Syria who possibly knew the Apostle John personally. He was arrested and sent to Rome to be executed, and he wrote letters to churches along the way.
The error he fought was a teaching that said Jesus only appeared to be human — that he looked like a real person but was not actually made of flesh and blood. Ignatius saw this as devastating. If Jesus did not genuinely suffer and die, then his death means nothing. If his body was not real, then the bread and cup of communion are empty gestures.
For Ignatius, John 6 was a direct answer to this problem. Jesus said his flesh is real food and his blood is real drink. That only matters if the flesh and blood are real.
Irenaeus of Lyon (died around AD 202)
Irenaeus was a bishop in what is now southern France. He had a living connection to the apostles through his teacher Polycarp, who had known the Apostle John.
The error he fought was a movement that taught the physical world was either evil or a mistake — that the true God had nothing to do with creation, that Jesus was a purely spiritual being sent to liberate souls from the trap of matter, and that only certain people with secret knowledge could be saved.
Irenaeus used John 6 to show that this gets Jesus exactly backwards. Jesus does not offer escape from the physical world. He enters it. He takes bread in his hands. He feeds five thousand real people who are physically hungry. The Word became flesh — that is the center of the Gospel, not the escape from flesh.
John Chrysostom (died AD 407)
Chrysostom — the nickname means ‘golden-mouthed’ — was one of the greatest preachers in church history. He became the Archbishop of Constantinople, the most powerful church post in the eastern Roman empire, and was eventually exiled twice for preaching too directly against the wealthy and the powerful. He died on a forced march through the mountains.
What he saw in John 6 was primarily a pastoral picture: Jesus using hard teaching to separate genuine followers from people who were only there for what they could get. The crowd’s departure, for Chrysostom, was not a tragedy. It was the teaching doing exactly what it was supposed to do. And Peter’s response — ‘where else would we go’ — was not triumphant faith. It was honest, incomplete, loyal faith. You do not have to understand everything. You have to know there is nowhere else to go.
Cyril of Alexandria (died AD 444)
Cyril was the Archbishop of Alexandria in Egypt and one of the most precise theological thinkers the early church produced. He spent much of his life fighting a teaching that said Jesus was essentially two people — a divine being living inside a human body, the way someone lives in a house — rather than one genuinely united person who was fully God and fully human at the same time.
This mattered for John 6 because the whole point of eating Jesus’s flesh depends on what that flesh actually is. If Jesus is merely a very holy man with God living inside him, then his flesh is just ordinary flesh. But if Jesus is genuinely God become human — one person, not two — then his flesh carries divine life within it, and receiving him goes all the way to the life of God.
Augustine of Hippo (died AD 430)
Augustine was a North African bishop whose influence on Western Christianity — Catholic and Protestant alike — is greater than almost any other single figure. Luther was shaped by him. Calvin quoted him constantly. Both sides of the Reformation appealed to him.
Before becoming a Christian he had spent years unable to change despite wanting to — knowing what was right and being unable to do it consistently. That experience made him take very seriously Paul’s teaching about the human will being genuinely broken, not just weak.
When he read verse 44 — ‘no one can come to me unless the Father draws him’ — he took it literally. People do not come to God under their own steam. The very desire to seek God is itself a gift. Left entirely to itself, the human will turns away from God, not toward him. God has to move first.
His most famous line on this passage: give me a person who is truly in love with God, and they will know exactly what this drawing feels like — a pull that is not their own manufacturing. That is what he believed John 6:44 was describing.
WHAT ALL FIVE AGREED ON
Despite their different concerns and different centuries, all five of these men read John 6 and came to the same basic conclusion: Jesus is not offering better religion. He is offering himself — actually, completely, as the source of life. And the question the chapter puts to everyone who reads it is the same question it put to the crowd that day: is that what you came for?
Prepared for Source of Old Faith Church · John Hargrove · March 2026
There is a quiet lesson in the way engineers trace a signal.
Signal tracing is not complicated. You find the source. You follow the line. You locate every place the signal was lost, degraded, or redirected. And then you ask: what was the original transmission? What was it always trying to say?
Life with God is often very much like that.
Over time the signal of our life can become noisy. Wounds, disappointments, fear, and the voices of others can introduce distortion. The message that once felt clear begins to sound faint. We begin to wonder if the signal was ever there at all.
But the signal did not begin with the noise.
Scripture reminds us that our lives began with a transmission from God Himself. Before the world grew loud, the message was simple: you are loved, you are called, and you belong to Him.
Just as an engineer traces a circuit back to the source, the soul can trace its life back to the heart of God. When we do, we begin to recognize where the signal was weakened — where fear spoke louder than faith, where the world redirected what God originally spoke.
The good news is that the Source has never changed.
God’s message toward us has never degraded. His voice is still transmitting the same truth it always has. Through Jesus Christ the line is restored, the signal strengthened, and the message becomes clear again.
You are not lost. You are not forgotten. The signal is still there.
Sometimes the most faithful thing we can do is simply trace our way back to the Source and listen again.
“Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.” — James 4:8
Today, take a moment to quiet the noise. Follow the line of your life back to where it began. Listen carefully.
John Hargrove Seeking Truth and Reality 