Lent 5B, 17 March 2024. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
- Jeremiah 31: 31-34. I will put my law within them and I will write it on their hearts.
- Hebrews 5: 5-10. Jesus offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears.
- John 12: 20-33. We wish to see Jesus.
O God of our help, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
A year has passed in the Gospel of John since our reading from last Sunday. Suddenly, we are only a few days away from Jesus’ crucifixion. The context for our reading today is that, according to John, after spending the last few years darting in and out of hiding, Jesus has come into Jerusalem very publicly for the last time. This part of John is filled with references to the crowds who were in Jerusalem for Passover. Jesus has just ridden up to Jerusalem on a donkey, with huge crowds waving palm branches and shouting Hosanna (which is Hebrew for help us, please or save us, please). Some irritated and fearful colleagues of Jesus’ have muttered to one another about him: “You see, you can do nothing. Look the world has gone over to him.”
The city was crowded with people from all over the place, who had come for the festival of Passover. John writes that among the crowds were some Greeks who had come to worship at the festival. By the early first century of the Common Era, there were large Jewish communities in Greece. This is a minority opinion, but I don’t think these Greeks were Gentiles. I believe they were Jews from Greece, who had come into Jerusalem from the Diaspora to worship during Passover and had heard about Jesus when they got to the city. They found Philip from Bethsaida in the Galilee. Philip went to find Andrew, who was also from Bethsaida (both of whom had a Greek names). In other words, none of them was a Judean, but all were Jewish. This matters a great deal when we translate the Greek word Judaoi as Judeans instead of Jews in the Gospels.
Because we know that the Gospel of John’s writing is heavy with metaphors, we can imagine that when the Greeks said they wished to see Jesus, that didn’t just mean laying eyes on him, but it also meant they wished to understand, accept, or affirm Jesus’ teaching, just as see means in English. Now it’s not clear at all whether the Greeks got to see Jesus and whether they heard what he had to say next. Perhaps Jesus’ long response was another way of saying, “Look, I can’t meet with anybody else because my time is up.” I’m reading the story this year, however, as Jesus’ response to the Jews who had come from Greece and were standing amid the crowd close by Philip and Andrew. I imagine that they all wanted to understand. Here’s what I imagine Jesus wanted them to know. Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. The grain is singular (alone) until it falls into the earth, breaks open, and grows to bear fruit, which is plural and communal.
Then Jesus says, “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” I want to unpack that, because I don’t believe that Jesus is calling on his followers to hate their lives. Rather, he is calling his followers to fullness of life, which is a matter of priorities and service. Jesus is saying that those who prioritize the esteem of their own souls (psyches, identities, or reputations) will miss the boat. They are clinging to the wrong thing. Those who live in pursuit of personal prestige and personal power are losing out on sharing in the Realm of God. Those who esteem less (another way to translate hate), those who place less value on their own coercive prestige and corrupt personal power, and who prioritize the communal good by loving and serving others, will keep or protect their souls in the realm of God. In the context of the whole Gospel of John, this is about service to others, about leading by feeding others, healing others, caring for others, loving others.
Of course, that’s not what got Jesus killed. What got him killed was his civil disobedience, subverting the prestige and power of military or government authority, which was functioning at the expense of the people. This is not a teaching about exchanging life on earth for life in heaven. This is a teaching about the longing to experience heaven on earth. Eternal life is all life, physical and spiritual, at all times including now, so essentially true, so beautifully integrated in the community, that even death cannot squash it. This is about the deepest kind of integrity. Perhaps you know that Mexican proverb that comes from a Greek poem, “They tried to bury us. They did not know we were seeds.” [1] Or perhaps you know the U2 song, “Love is bigger than anything in its way”? [2]
I want you to see and understand that Jesus’ soul (his psyche, the essence of his identity) was deeply troubled. I want to pause here to acknowledge that, because we often get the impression that Jesus was unmoved and unwavering in his march toward crucifixion. Our reading from Hebrews this morning describes Jesus offering up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears. Don’t miss that. No stoicism here. Jesus was agonizing over what anyone could have seen, what anyone would have known was coming. He knew what was coming, even as he knew in his heart of hearts that his life and his death would be about glorifying the name of the Holy One, the Kiddush ha-Shem, which means the sanctification of the divine name. [3] Glorify means to magnify, praise, honor; and sanctify means to set apart for sacred service. That’s what Jesus lived for and what he was willing to die for in, what a colleague of mine calls his “revolution against riches,” his “mutiny against self-righteousness,” and his “treason against military and political might, all and only to the glory of God’s Holy Name. [4]
When the thunder rolls, some hear the voice of the Divine saying, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” This is the moment in the Gospel of John that didn’t happen at Jesus’ baptism, and John doesn’t have a transfiguration story. The voice from heaven comes at this moment of Jesus’ agony about moving forward with love and integrity, which will result in his death. What’s important to me is that the voice from heaven is not just promising a future glory, but an ongoing glorification connecting the past with a hope for the future, if and whenever we can let go of, indeed die, to whatever separates us from love.
In this Gospel passage we hear Jesus’ hope that when he has been lifted up on a cross, he will draw all people to himself. Perhaps some of you are here because you too feel drawn to Jesus, drawn to his teachings, perhaps his healings, feedings, and freeings. Perhaps, like me, some of you feel drawn to Jesus’ demonstrated belief in the dignity and value of every human being, his willingness to risk and ultimately lose his life for the sake of the justice and truth of the grace of God.
According to the Gospel of John, the hour has come, and the time is now. Martin Luther King, Jr. called it the “fierce urgency of now.” Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. For Jesus, is the ruler Satan? Is the ruler Caesar? Is there a difference? This is not just about Jesus, and about his troubled heart and determination to bear fruit. John is reminding his community at the end of the first century that the hour has come and the time is now. We use this text to remember that the hour has come and the time is now for us; because, as you often hear me say, the question is not, “Did this really happen?” but “Is this really happening?” What hour has come for us? For what is the time now? What within any of us (individually, as a parish, or as a community) must fall to the ground and die in order to bear much fruit? Who among us has heard the voice of an angel or an echo of the glory of the Holy One, when others have just heard a rumble of thunder signaling a coming storm?
For me, to be drawn to Jesus is to feel hope and to feel healing power in the midst of so much suffering and death. One cannot be drawn to Jesus without eventually feeling pain: the pain of sinfulness, betrayal, the cross, the suffering of others. To be drawn to Jesus is to have your heart broken open, cracked open like a seed so that it can produce fruit – some fruit for eating, for giving away, and for sowing. Your heart is where the Holy One has inscribed the Law of Love according to Jeremiah. Your heart knows without having to be taught. When you know love, you know it by heart, not by thinking about it. To be drawn to Jesus in this deep way is to engage more and more with the mystery of the Holy. It seems to me that is an essential part of the observance of Lent in the Church.
In his autobiography Surrender, Bono writes about church being a practice rather than a place:
There is no promised land. There is only the promised pilgrimage. We search through the noise for signal, and we learn to ask better questions of ourselves and each other.
He calls the signal God, and he looks for God as Love expressed as action in the present, “in the fierce urgency of now.” [5] In the midst of so much suffering and death: [6]
If you listen you can hear the silence say
When you think you’re done, you’ve just begun
Love is bigger than anything in its way.
- Dinos Christianopoulos (his nom de plume; his birth name is Konstantinos Dimitriadis) is credited with this idea.
- Joey Ramone, lyrics recorded by U2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Is_Bigger_Than_Anything_in_Its_Way.
- Ronald Allen & Clark Williamson, Preaching the Gospels without Blaming the Jews: A lectionary commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press), p. 117.
- The Rev. Lia Scholl
- Bono, Surrender. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2022.
- Ramone, op. cit.