Juror Number 3 | Tim Henderson

Today, after our short break for Palm Sunday and Easter, we're gonna resume our study of John's Gospel in chapter seven. I wonder if you guys are familiar with the play and the movie, 12 Angry Men. It's been performed like a million different times, but maybe the most famous version is the 1957 film produced by and starring Henry Fonda. Have you guys seen this? You familiar with this story? The whole thing is a classic film. It's all set in a single room—a jury deliberation room. And the story is about a young boy, a poor teenager, who's been accused of fatally stabbing his father.

As the movie begins, all the jurors are in this room and 11 of them very quickly want to cast their vote that he's guilty. But there's one holdout: juror number eight. He's just not convinced. And so he begins this process that very deliberately and unassumingly begins to dismantle the prosecution's case. As the movie unfolds, juror after juror after juror changes their votes. To the point that now instead of being eleven to one in favor of convicting him, it's now eleven to one in favor of declaring him not guilty. And there's one holdout: juror number three.

Juror number three has been resisting this the whole while. And now we're at the climactic scene in the film where the other 11 are confronting juror number three over maintaining a position that they have all become convinced is really untenable. We're gonna watch a three-minute clip of the climactic scene of the film, 12 Angry Men.

[Film clip plays]

Juror number three has the ability to know the truth, but he doesn't want to.

Now the jurors in that story aren't called by their names. They're juror number one, juror number two, juror number three, and so on. And I think that's a device that's meant to depersonalize it because any one of us could be, and almost certainly has been, juror number three.

The Identity of Jesus

I wanna show you this group of people who, when it comes to the identity of Jesus, are juror number three.

When they heard these words, some of the people said, "This really is the prophet." And others said, "This is the Christ." But some said, "Is the Christ to come from Galilee? Has not the scripture said that the Christ comes from the offspring of David and comes from Bethlehem, the village where David was?" So there was a division among the people over him. Some of them wanted to arrest him, but no one laid hands on him. The officers then came to the chief priests and the Pharisees who said to them, "Why did you not bring him?" And the officers answered, "No one ever spoke like this man." And the Pharisees answered them, "Have you also been deceived? Have any of the authorities or Pharisees believed in him? But this crowd that does not know the law is accursed." And Nicodemus, who had gone to him before and who was one of them, said to them, "Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?" And they replied, "Are you from Galilee too? Search and see that no prophet arises from Galilee." — John 7:40-52

Now what's been happening here in this scene has been going on for a long time in John's gospel, and it's gonna continue past chapter seven. Namely, a giant investigation about the identity of Jesus. It's just this constant swirling question: who is he? What best explains this? We've looked at this in the past because it just keeps showing up in John. But people thought maybe he is the prophet. Maybe he is the Christ. The prophet is a particular character that's mentioned in Deuteronomy 18 that the Jews were anticipating. And the Christ or the Messiah, of course, there's a million anticipations in the Hebrew scriptures that someone is coming. What they didn't realize is that the Christ and the prophet are really the same person. I think we can excuse them for their confusion about that. I don't know that any of us would have figured that out either. We have an awful lot of benefit from hindsight to realize that the prophet is the Christ. But what I think is less excusable is that there was all sorts of information that they had available to them that they did not want to see.

There are in particular in this passage two very startling errors in their reasoning. And when we watch their story play out, we're supposed to see it as profoundly ironic because they're acting like they've got this ironclad case. But we can see as the observer that they're wrong and they're obviously wrong. And they're doing this with an arrogance that just underscores their foolishness. They are very much like juror number three.

The Bethlehem Error

So here's the first instance, verse 41:

Others said, "This is the Christ." But some said, "Is the Christ to come from Galilee? Has not the scripture said that the Christ comes from the offspring of David and comes from Bethlehem, the village where David was?" — John 7:41-42

They knew that Jesus came from Galilee, and he did. He grew up in Nazareth. And they think that the Messiah is gonna come from Bethlehem, and they're right about that. He is supposed to come from Bethlehem. The Bethlehem deal is one of the clearest and most easily referenced prophecies in the Old Testament about the Messiah. It comes from Micah five, and you have probably heard about this on more Christmases than you can remember. This is Micah five verse two:

But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from old, from ancient times. Therefore, Israel will be abandoned until the time when she who is in labor gives birth and the rest of his brothers return to join the Israelites. He will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God. And they will live securely, for then his greatness will reach to the ends of the earth. — Micah 5:2-4

This is a messianic prediction of the highest order. It is clear. It is specific. It is unambiguously about the Christ. And so they're right about that. And they're right that he grew up in Galilee. But what are they wrong about? They don't know or they don't wanna know that he was born in Bethlehem, but he was. And this is clearly a test. Matthew and Luke both talk about this. You've heard about this probably all your life that he was born in Bethlehem. That information was available to them. It was easily available to them. But they could not imagine this bizarre circumstance in which a person might be born in one place but grow up in another. How many of you were born in one place but grew up in another? I mean, it's just not that unimaginable, is it? But to them, it was like over the line. They couldn't get their head around this.

And so when we hear them arguing, "He can't be the Messiah. He wasn't born in Bethlehem," we're supposed to be thinking, "But he was. And you are building your case and your opposition to him, not based on the truth, but based on your own faulty understanding." They had an ability to know, just like juror number three, but they didn't want to. They allowed their assumptions to remain unchecked because they wanted them to remain unchecked. They wanted to be able to continue to believe what they preferred.

The Second Error

And in case you're not sure if I may be making more out of that than I should, just watch what happens next. It's the exact same thing. John puts these two things back to back. So take a look at verse 45:

The officers then came to the chief priests and the Pharisees who said to them, "Why did you not bring him?" And the officers answered, "No one ever spoke like this man." And the Pharisees answered them, "Well, have you also been deceived? Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in him? But this crowd that does not know the law is accursed." Nicodemus, who had gone to him before and he was one of them, said to them, "Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?" — John 7:45-51

And listen to their reply. Are you from Galilee too? Search and see that no prophet arises from Galilee.

Like juror number three, they are convinced that Jesus is a fraud and that anybody who doesn't see this is stupid. This is obvious to them. And essentially, they've got this tight little syllogism. It goes like this:

Number one, Jesus came from Galilee. Number two, God would never call a prophet from such a wretched backwater as Galilee. And the conclusion flows naturally. Therefore, Jesus cannot be a prophet.

You guys, the first premise is true. He is from Galilee. He grew up in Nazareth. But what about the second premise? Beyond just being prejudiced, is it accurate? Is it true that no prophet has ever come from Galilee? I'm curious if anybody happens to have this strange little bit of bible trivia in your head. Do you know which very significant prophet is from Galilee? Jonah. It is Jonah.

Now, it's not necessarily the case that you would need to know that, but they should have. Let me show it. Let me prove it to you.

The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it because its wickedness has come up before me. — Jonah 1:1

That's not that helpful in establishing where he's from, but it does give us his full name, which is basically his name and his father's name. He is Jonah, son of Amittai. And if you were to go to two Kings chapter 14, he'll show up again there.

Amaziah was the one who restored the boundaries of Israel from Lebo Hamath to the Sea Of Arabah in accordance with the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, spoken through the servant, Jonah son of Amittai, the prophet from Gath Hepher. — 2 Kings 14:25

Anybody want to guess where Gath Hepher is? It's Galilee. There he is. Look on the map. So we're up in the northern part of Israel near the Sea Of Galilee. You can't read it, but I promise that's true. That's Gath Hepher right there.

Now again, there's no reason you would need to know that if you happen to have cross referenced two Kings. God bless you. But they should have known it. They're like, look it up. And so I'm like, all right, I'll look it up. And you're wrong. But you're wrong because you want to be wrong. They don't want to know.

And there is, you guys, in human nature this very unbecoming feature: when we don't want to know something, we don't. And when we do want to believe something, it's really easy to marshal the evidence that supports our view while ignoring everything that contradicts it. Have you ever noticed this? Not in yourself, I'm sure, but in literally every other person.

That is what John is showing us here. Human beings who might otherwise be rational become incredibly irrational when we find the truth to be unpleasant to us. We become what Paul describes in Ephesians 4, futile in our thinking.

Futility of Thinking

Take a look at how he describes this:

I tell you this and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of our hearts. — Ephesians 4:17

If we're in a Bible study, I would make you break this down. And there's this big long causal chain where there is some effect that had a cause, but that cause is actually the effect of another cause. And these things all just loop together. So what he's basically saying is, your futile thinking was caused by your darkened understanding, which was the product of the ignorance that is in you. But the first domino that fell was your hard heart. And this is just a reality of our nature. If your heart is hard, you just get ignorant, your understanding darkens, and your thinking becomes more futile. We just become more stupid.

As Paul's unpacking that reality, there's simply the case that people whose thoughts are futile make arguments seemingly in support of their point, but which literally and actually vividly undermine it. And it's always really obvious when somebody else is doing it and almost impossible to see when we are doing it ourselves.

For these people, they're claiming, obviously a prophet doesn't come from Galilee. But obviously a prophet has. Obviously, he can't be the Messiah because he's not from Bethlehem. But obviously he is.

You guys, the problem with trying to not think about things is that we're so often successful. Daniel Kahneman wrote a fantastic book. It's called Thinking Fast and Slow. And Kahneman gives some really helpful insights into the psychology going on behind the scenes here. So bear with me because I'm basically going to spend the rest of my time here talking about Daniel Kahneman's book.

I think it's gonna be worth our time because it really does give significant insight that explains this shortcoming that we share in common with Jesus' detractors. Okay? So Kahneman's book, the broader point of his book is that we have two different kinds of thinking systems. And he just very creatively names them system one and system two.

All right? So thinking system one is quick. It's just fast. It's efficient. It requires almost no energy or effort on our parts. And fortunately, we can get away with this one all the time. Your life, when you're driving your car and you just left just a little bit right, you're making a million really quick decisions. You're not deliberately thinking about every tree that you pass. And so a lot of your life functions in this really quick, think fast thinking system one. Praise God. Life would grind to a halt if it didn't.

But problem is a lot of life is complicated. And sometimes that quick thinking system doesn't work. And you've got to shift gears into this slower, more deliberate, more engaged process. Much less efficient, but better for handling complex problems. All right? So you got system one, you got system two. We like to economize effort. And so wherever possible, we wanna live in system one. We want things to be as easy as they can, but unfortunately, a huge amount of life requires system two. And so in order to live in this mismatch between what you want to do and what you must do, you've developed a number of strategies. And in particular, you have developed a whole bunch of heuristics. Now a heuristic is simply a mental shortcut that you employ to make hard things easier. And you do this all the time.

All right? So I'll give you an example. Tell me the answer to that problem. 9. Instant, easy, effortless. Give me this one. 32. One more. Okay. What's that? 42. 42. Okay. That's third grade. You memorize your multiplication tables in third grade. We could do this all day. That is system one. It's quick. It's reflexive. It takes nothing.

How about this one? 408. Shut up, Dave. Dave is a liar, but he came to the first service. Okay? Now, when you look at that, instantly you're like, ah, crud. Maybe you're doing a bunch of different strategies. Maybe you're just like, give me a piece of paper and a pencil, right? Maybe you're visually stacking it because you learned this algorithm and then you're going like, okay, seven times four and then the eight and then carry the two and then that gets hard. So then you just get out your phone and just slam in your calculator, okay? But if you didn't have a super brilliant mind like Dave Sloop, well, you might do this. You might employ a heuristic. You might look at that and say, all right, 17 is a little bit less than 20. 24 is a little bit more than 20. So the answer is really close, probably to 20 times 20. And now we're in business because what's that? 400. Good enough, right? Now Dave knows it's actually four zero eight. But 400 as a simplified answer, depending on what you're doing, that might get you there. Okay? It might be good enough. We do this all the time. You're constantly looking for shortcuts.

Problem is a lot of the heuristics that we employ, a lot of the mental shortcuts that we rely on are not nearly so benign. I'll give you here's another one. Figuring out who is gonna be a good leader of your company or your country is really hard. And so we employ a substitution. Do you know what is easier than who's gonna be the best leader? Who is tallest? Are you aware of this? Do you know that Fortune 500 companies have incredibly tall leaders? Something like 40% of the leaders are six foot two, whereas in the country, it's like three or 4% of the people are like that. Right? Height is not a really good determiner on who's going to be a great leader, but we rely on it all the time. U.S. Presidents are all ridiculously taller than average. When I was in state college, there was a church that had a, literally there was a, the pastor was a dwarf. And I always just I marveled like how in the world did this guy get past such an overwhelming instinct there? And he somehow did. And maybe he was because he was a great leader, you know.

Here's Kahneman citing a study on substitutions that we make all the time. Listen to this. He says, the dominance of conclusions over arguments is the most pronounced where emotions are involved. Okay? When he says the dominance of conclusions over arguments, what he means is you've got argumentation. You've got reasoning that leads you in some direction, but then some other conclusion just vetoes the whole thing. Right? When do we do that? When does some out of the left field conclusion just swamp all reason? Very often when emotions are involved. He says the psychologist, Paul Slovek, has proposed an affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world.

Most people do not determine their beliefs about reality based on what the evidence suggests, but based on what they already happen to prefer. As Thomas Kramer said, what the heart desires, the will chooses, and the mind justifies. And he was not flattering us when he said that. That is a deep criticism.

Again Kahneman says this: Slovak eventually developed the notion of an affect heuristic in which people make judgments and decisions by consulting their emotions. Do I like it? Do I hate it? How strongly do I feel about it? In many domains of life, Slovak said, people form opinions and make choices that directly express their feelings often without knowing that they are doing so.

The affect heuristic is an instance of substitution in which the answer to an easy question—how do I feel about it—serves as an answer to a much harder question: what do I think about it? And that substitution is critical. You are being asked to think about something. But thinking is hard and you don't want to do it. And so you use your feelings as a substitute because that is easy. And as I said, one of the many problems with attempting not to think is that it's just so easy to succeed.

That is exactly what is happening to these people in John chapter seven. They do not want to think about if Jesus might be from Bethlehem or if a prophet might come from Galilee. Because they've already decided and they like what they currently believe. Why would they want to change that? They don't want to want him. They don't want to like him. They don't want to approve of him. And so they allow their emotional response to the fact that he's threatening something they hold dear—in particular their own self-righteousness—to replace an honest cognitive response. They are making themselves stupid on purpose so they continue to feel how they want to feel.

Now I hope that two things are happening for you right now. Number one, you realize that that's terrible. That a huge amount of the dysfunction of the world is explained by this exact phenomenon. And number two, that you realize that you do this too. I don't think anybody escapes from this.

Now think about it for a second. Can you see where you might be doing this? And what perhaps it is costing you? Where are you replacing a hard question with an easy question? Where are you deciding to answer the difficult question—what do I think about this?—with a much easier question of how do I feel about this? And what is it costing you when you do?

What it costs this group is the ability to see and delight in the savior that stood in their very midst. Is there any chance that it is costing you the same thing? If so, what a tragedy. They are believing obvious lies but they were so blinded by their predetermined judgments that they did not know it. And it's incredibly dangerous to not know what we could know but don't want to know. We are responsible to check our hearts to be honest and when we find that it is hardening or has already grown hard we should step back.

Jesus invites us to live lives that are soft before him. And doing so protects us from this very phenomenon. So just consider: have you made commitments to not be hurt, or restricted, or contradicted, or judged? And if so, how might these commitments have hardened your heart such that you can no longer see the truth? If you will let those protective commitments go, you can soften, your ignorance can melt away, and your thinking can clarify. And you could be better able to discern that which is true, and good, and beautiful. So that you can partake of it and have all the blessings of it.

And there is nothing more true or more good or more beautiful than Jesus himself, and it would be a tragedy of the highest order if we allowed our own hard hearts to block us from seeing him in his splendor. May God give us the grace to distance ourselves from our own inner juror number three. To keep us from employing heuristics that we think help us, but that actually just blind us. So that we can and will see and worship the glorious Christ and enjoy him forever.

Lord Jesus, you're so patient with us. So willing to wait while we chase all sorts of false fantasies, believing lies. Would you intervene again and help us, Lord? Show us where we are just believing stupid things, false things, and unreasonable things because they just happen to feel better. Because we happen to prefer them, because it preserves some sense of our own autonomy, our own self-righteousness, whatever fictional world we may have built to comfort ourselves. Lord, you break through it that we would see and know and love the truth. For you are the way, the truth, and the life. We love you. Amen.