There is so much here, in today’s
passage from John’s gospel. It is long. It is extraordinarily complex. It makes
me want to create a chart, or draw a diagram to help me to understand. There is
so much here, far too much for us to fully unpack in a few minutes on a Sunday
morning. Another preacher wrote this week, “John's gospel is so full of nuance
and inter-textual references that it is difficult to digest 13 verses at once.
This text needs a table filled with friends and a pot of coffee.”[i]
So here we are. And you are my
table filled with friends; we can grab the coffee later.
Let’s start here: “We wish to see
Jesus.”
And how.
I want to share a very brief
litany with you. I want to ask you to hold these names in prayer while we sit
around this table together. These are some of the names that were in the news
this week: Sean Bell.[ii] Lydia
Parker.[iii]
Rabbi Jonathan Sandler and his sons Gabriel (age 4) and Arieh (age 5).[iv]
Bei Bei Shuai.[v] Archbishop
Oscar Romero.[vi]
Shaima Alawadi.[vii] Trayvon
Martin.[viii]
Each name tells the story of
someone whose life has been afflicted, or traumatized, or brutally ended. Each
person—man, woman, adult, child—has somehow been lost—to violence, to hatred,
to “the system,” to an unjust law or the immoral and fear-filled use of force.
Each one might well have been moved to say—from the jail cell, in the dying
breath, in the midst of the uncontrollable spasms, “God, you who are my
Heavenly Parent, save me from this hour.”
We wish to see Jesus.
When the world as we know it
becomes harsh and uncompromising, dark and intimidating, downright terrifying,
each of us has the impulse to search, to hope, to long for some sign, some
wisdom, some thing, some one to help us make sense of it all. We want to
understand. We want to transcend.
We wish to see Jesus.
That is the hope expressed this
morning by a group of outsiders—the Greeks, who have come to Jerusalem for the
Passover festival. They are not Jews, but they are known as God-fearers, so
they are given tolerance. They are offered a cautious acceptance. They can come
and hang out on the fringes of the festival, because they are foreigners, they
are “not us.”
And, in the aftermath of Palm
Sunday (this happens sometimes—we get the story all out of order), they come to
some of Jesus’ disciples and say, “We wish to see Jesus.” We are not told why.
We might wonder. What have they heard about Jesus? What things have they been
told? What are they hoping for, what are they longing for?
And one thing leads to another
(and one person leads to another) and they finally see Jesus, and—oh, here we
are with talkative Jesus again. And what he says is so startling to us. Imagine
you went to see your congressman, and when you had finally been escorted into
his office, he said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
But imagine now that you had not
grown up in Endicott or in the United States, but in some country where, for
instance, women did not have equal rights to men. Or people of color did not
have equal rights to those of primarily European descent. And this was the very
first time you had access to the possibility of a better life, a fairer world,
a voice in it all. And you heard those same words: All are created equal.
Imagine how that might feel.
Jesus says this to the outsiders,
and to his disciples, and to us:
“The hour has come for the Son of
Man to be glorified” [John 12:23].
This is a pivotal moment in
John’s gospel. This is the moment when Jesus finishes one kind of work, and
begins another. Until this moment, Jesus has been teaching and giving
signs—what we might call miracles—signs pointing to who he is and what he is
about. His greatest and last sign was the raising of his friend Lazarus from
the dead. And now, he has finished with those signs, and begins to walk the
path towards the cross. Which he calls, somewhat perversely, “glory.” When
Jesus says that he will be glorified, he means that he will be crucified.
We wish to see Jesus, the Greeks
say. We wish to see Jesus, Bei Bei Shuai and the parents of Trayvon Martin say.
And Jesus’ response is this: you wish to see me? I am the one who will die.
And Jesus continues with a
metaphor that reminds us that God is a gardener: “Very truly, I tell you,
unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single
grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” [John 12:24]. God, it seems, is all about the fruit,
just as everyone who ever put on his or her gardening gloves and pulled out
weeds on an unseasonably warm March day. We want those beautiful cosmos, those
friendly sunflowers, those succulent tomatoes, those aromatic herbs. And so we
are willing to put in a little time, or a lot of time. A little elbow grease,
or some major twisting and pulling of muscles. We pay it forward, the effort, so that in the end, we will
have those glorious fruits of our labors, of our gardening.
God is like that. Only, it’s not
mildly pulled muscles God is willing to pay forward, it is all of God’s power
and might. This is the cost, this is the planting that comes along with
incarnation. You wish to see Jesus, who is the reality of God in our midst? You
wish to see God, who makes the stranger welcome, even the one in the hoodie?
Here is God: the one who is so committed to humanity, so head-over-divine-heels
in love with us that it translates into a willingness to be fully human: to
live, to suffer, and to die. Because we live and suffer and die. You wish to see Jesus? Jesus is the one
who is, without reserve, of the earth, just like we are. A poet wrote,
To be of the Earth is to know
the restlessness of being a seed
the darkness of being planted
the struggle toward the light
the pain of growth into the light
the joy of bursting and bearing fruit
the love of being food for someone
the scattering of your seeds
the decay of the seasons
the mystery of death
and the miracle of birth[ix]
Jesus continues: “Those who love
their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it
for eternal life” [John 12:25].
When I read that sentence this
week my first impulse was to say, Houston, we have a problem. Because—I love my
life. I love my family. I love my loving relationships. I love my work. I have
not a single complaint about any of it.
But the problem with all that is
that it is very much focused on self. The key is “in this world,” and I am not
an island but a member of a larger body, the body of Christ, and our body is in
pain. Shaima Alawadi. Sean Bell. Lydia Parker. Oscar Romero. Our body is
rotting in prison, and being denied its rights, and bleeding and dying; and
while that is true… I cannot truly say that I love my life in this world,
because I do not love our life in
this world. I am not cut off from the pain of the rest of the body.
We wish to see Jesus. Not “I.” “We.” And Jesus’ words are sobering:
“Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be
also…” [John 12:26a].
At the end of our passage, we
hear the voice of God promising to glorify Jesus again, only it sounds like
thunder or angels. And we see Jesus being lifted up and drawing all people to
himself, only it looks like a brutally beaten man dying on a cross. It’s a most
ingenious paradox. How does God come to earth? As a fragile, fearless human
being, who stands up to the authorities until they hang him from a tree. How is
God-made-flesh glorified? But submitting the Divine self to the deepest
degradations of human experience. What wondrous love is this, O my soul? This
is love that is all in, no holding back, with us, in every conceivable way to
the bitter end. God is in the young man gunned down because he thought he’d go
out for a snack. God is in the California woman beaten to death because her
native country was Iraq. God is in the archbishop who accepted that he would
die a martyr because of his insistence that the poor had rights and dignity,
and who died as he held the bread of life in his hands.
But God is a gardener. And so God
intends for there to be fruit, from all of these plantings. And the fruits are
already budding. Already, in the cities and in the countryside, in the parks
and in the mountains, God’s people are longing, and yearning, and now working
for a better life, for a fairer world—not just for themselves, but for those
who can no longer participate in that work. We bear the fruits of this work
when we become a voice for the voiceless poor. We bear the fruits of God’s
labors when we give a party whose sole purpose is to open our pockets and
wallets on behalf of disaster victims and building stronger communities and
feeding the hungry. We bear the fruits of God’s labors when we live out Jesus’
ethic of uncompromising welcome.
We wish to see Jesus. And when we
are willing to give over our lives to bringing forth the fruits God has
planted, we can look around at one another and at God’s renewed world and do
just that. Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] D. Mark Davis, “Losing one’s
psyche; Hearing a voice; Getting a sign,” at Left Behind and Loving It: Living As if God’s Steadfast Love Really
Does Endure Forever (http://leftbehindandlovingit.blogspot.com/2012/03/losing-ones-psyche-hearing-voice.html),
March 20, 2012.
[ii] An unarmed man who was shot
50 times by New York City police officers as he left his bachelor party.
[iii] One of several dozen young
women afflicted with a neurological syndrome in Le Roy, NY.
[iv] Three of those killed at a
Jewish school in France on March 19, 2012.
[v] A woman who was severely
depressed upon learning that the father of the child she was carrying (she was
eight months pregnant) was married to another woman. She attempted suicide but
survived; her baby did not. She has been in jail for one year, charged with
murder.
[vi] Assassinated in El Salvador 32-years
ago yesterday, while saying Mass.
[vii] A 32-year-old Iraqi
immigrant who died Saturday March 24 from injuries sustained during a beating
in her home in El Cajon, San Diego County. Alawadi had been on life support
ever since her 17-year-old daughter had discovered her unconscious body
Wednesday. The stranger who beat her left a note, “Go back to your country.”
[viii] An unarmed 17-year-old
teenager who was pursued and shot to death when he went out for a bag of
Skittles and a bottle of iced tea.
[ix]
John Soos;
with thanks to my friend Yvonne Lucia.
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