SunMar292009
Scripture: John 12:20-33
“We wish to see Jesus,” say these strangers from another land. That, in a sense, is the whole endeavor of faith. It’s not just ancient Greeks, in this morning’s gospel reading, searching for the holy one; it’s also people throughout the centuries straining to get a glimpse of the face of God; and it’s all of us, in some manner or other, seeking an encounter with the God who is at the heart of it all. We, too, wish to see Jesus. We wouldn’t be here this morning if that weren’t, in some sense, what we were looking for.
We may put it slightly differently, of course. “I hate my work,” we may say. And from the standpoint of faith what we’re saying is, “I don’t think I’m doing what God intended me to be doing.” So we wish to see Jesus—in living out our vocation. We may have a vague sense of loneliness that needs soothing, and what we’re sensing underneath is a craving for the sort of community and connection that God knows is crucial. So we wish to see Jesus—in a rich and fulfilling social life. We may live with a nagging sense of guilt about something we never should have done, or about a missed opportunity to have made a difference, and what we’re realizing is that we need to confess and be forgiven. So we wish to see Jesus—in the rhythm of repentance and forgiveness.
In all kinds of ways—even when that’s not the way we typically put it—we “wish to see Jesus.” And in all kinds of ways, Jesus shows up—in a magnificent sunrise, in a new job offer that comes from out of the blue, in a friend who appears just when we need one, in a simple feeling of peace and tranquility.
We see Jesus in countless ways, if we have eyes to see. What causes those long-ago crowds to be a little uneasy, though, and eventually so testy that they kill him, is that all-too-often there’s something about Jesus showing up that upends our comfortable ways, something about Jesus showing up that asks of us a change and a commitment. “Anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life,” says Jesus. “But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal” (12:25, The Message). There’s a part of life we may have to let go. There are habits and instincts we may have to relinquish. We may have to actually slog the streets to find the new job, for example, or go out and try to meet people in order to develop the friendship, or look our failings square in the face if we’re going to confess. An addiction may have to be faced, an affair stopped, a delusion confronted. A Lenten journey with Christ is never too far from the cross, a cross that inevitably means death to parts of ourselves. And those deaths may jar us and make us want to run the other way.
In the story John tells, the stench of death hangs over this whole scene. Jesus has just brought a dead man back to life (11:1-57), and, as a result, while many are amazed, the religious leaders plan to put Jesus himself to death (11:53). Then Mary anoints his feet, to prepare him for burial, followed immediately by his triumphant journey into Jerusalem. Then we get today’s scene, in which Jesus talks about his death and its import. Finally we have the Last Supper and a final long discourse by Jesus, and then he’s hung up to die. So today’s words are a central part of the end.
This is not the Jesus we especially want to see, the Jesus who’s embroiled in conflict, and who pushes us relentlessly. We like the Jesus who’s peaceful and reassuring. We want to see the Jesus who’s the great comforter, the one who makes everything right and takes away all anxiety. And that Jesus is indeed there to be seen. But there’s another Jesus to be seen, as well. The Jesus of the gospels has a distinct edge that we tend to soften. It’s good for us to see that Jesus, too. Because it’s that Jesus who prods us to change and grow. It’s that Jesus who leads us to a better world.
Last Sunday’s Plain Dealer carried a stimulating op-ed piece by Nicholas Kristof lamenting the decline of the daily newspaper. More and more, of course, people get their news online. Now there’s nothing wrong with getting news online. Unless all we do is listen there for what we want to hear. “When we go online,” says Kristof, “each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about”—what another observer has called “The Daily Me.”
The trouble with getting most of our news online is that we filter it for the news that suits us. We can do that with newspapers, too, of course. But with newspapers, someone else is at least selecting a full spectrum of news and opinion. On the internet, the temptation is to listen only to opinions that resonate with ours, to stay away from news that unnerves or disturbs us, and to have confirmed precisely what we want confirmed. It can too easily become a way of reading and of living in the world that keeps us from growing or being challenged, a stance that simply supports all our prejudices and worst instincts.
Part of the danger of all this, as Kristof notes, is that we tend to retreat into “our own hermetically sealed political chambers.” By talking only with people who think like us, we sever any real community. To be true community, you have to talk to and be in relationship with people who think differently from you. There’s no one on the face of this earth with whom I agree about everything. So if I don’t make an attempt to move outside of my box, I’m simply going to be isolated. I’ll never really engage ideas and people different from me. And I’ll never be part of solutions to the great issues of the time, or even the tiny issues of the time. No church worth its salt can ever be filled only with like-minded people. Which is part of the reason that we celebrate communion: communion with everyone, even those who are in a different world from me.
The other major consequence, as Kristof observes, is that “the decline of traditional news media will accelerate the rise of The Daily Me, and we’ll be irritated less by what we read and find our wisdom confirmed more often. The danger is that this self-selected ‘news’ acts as a narcotic, lulling us into a self-confident stupor through which we will perceive in blacks and whites a world that typically unfolds in grays” (Mar. 22, 2009, p. G2).
I quote Kristof at some length because he parallels the point I’m making about scripture and the nature of Jesus. If we listen only to the Jesus who confirms all our present convictions, then we’ve missed the Jesus who, at the same time, challenges our daily habits and nudges us both to be changed ourselves, and at the same time to be agents of change in a world that always and continually falls short of the glory of God. There may well be a place, as a colleague of mine used to say, for “basinet Christianity,” where we get rocked to sleep in the bosom of the church. But there is certainly, as well, a place for the Jesus who rocks our very foundations and shocks us into new and ultimately far more redemptive ways of life. Jesus isn’t put to death for being too nice, after all. He’s put to death because his way is threatening and destabilizing. So following Jesus isn’t just about being nice, either. It’s about being transformed. The classical word for it is being “sanctified,” or being made holy. Which means not being precisely the way we are now. To follow Jesus asks something of us. It says no to some prized habits. It runs headlong into our lesser inclinations and values.
One biblical commentator says about this passage that when Jesus says that “hold[ing] on to life just as it is destroys that life,” he is calling into question what we might call “The System”—all the ways we order ourselves that are compromised and less than whole (Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 2, p. 143). When Jesus questions these powers-that-be, he is pointing out, for example, that there’s something deeply off-center about a consumerism that stuffs our closets and adds to our debt and overloads our landfills. When Jesus objects to the ways of The System, he is reminding us that the ways of violence and war are sad and pathetic attempts to achieve what we simply cannot achieve by dominating and killing. When Jesus lays down his life, it is a stark reminder that wholeness of life is much more about self-emptying and letting go and being “reckless in . . . love” (12:25, The Message) than it is about self-gratification and holding on tight and hoarding shamelessly.
“Time’s up,” says Jesus in The Message (12:23). By which he means that this is the moment to decide. And this is the moment to decide. And so is this. And this. And this. Every moment is the moment to decide. It’s the moment to decide for a way of life that is rooted in the ways of Jesus. It’s the moment to decide for hope against despair, for forgiveness against violence and retribution, for love against pettiness and resentment, for compassion against self-insulating withdrawal from the world, for generosity against the forces of stinginess and self-gratification.
“Reckless in love”: that’s when we see Jesus. God’s love for us in reckless in the extreme. It’s what we see in the bottomless gift of the last supper, a gift we’ll receive in just a moment. It’s what enables us to do what we probably couldn’t do on our own. And in return the call comes to us: be reckless in your own love, in even the most everyday moments of your life. For that’s where life is richest and truest: “real and eternal” (12:25, The Message).
This week, a church member was hurt and slighted by someone she knew. She went to her exercise class, and spent the whole time salivating about the end of the class, when she could finally tell her friend about their nasty neighbor. What she realized, in the middle of the class, was: that wasn’t the woman God had created her to be. How easy it would have been to indulge the venomous taste we all, at some level, crave. She didn’t, though. And in that resistance lay the dormant seed of God’s dominion springing to life. She resisted a baser instinct and gave herself to something grander. Of such simple gestures is the dominion of God. “Anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.” May that be the way it is for us, now and always. May we see Jesus.