Year B, Lent 5
March 22, 2015
Rev. Thomas L. Truby
John 12:20-33, Jeremiah 31:31-34 (Common English Bible, 2011)
Time to be Glorified!
When the Greeks, those non-Jewish outsiders to the north, want to see Jesus and make contact through Philip from Bethsaida, that new cosmopolitan city on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, it serves as a signal to Jesus telling him it is time to wrap it up. Jesus immediately begins wrestling with what comes next, his soul troubled by a counterintuitive choice. If he is to reveal his nonviolent, non-retributive God in the only way both Jews and Greeks have a chance of getting it, he has to take the next step. He must prepare himself for the end and this is why we read this text on the fifth Sunday in Lent, just before Palm Sunday and Holy Week. “The time has come for the Human One to be glorified.” While his disciples could not understand this, we know his glorification occurs on Good Friday, at his crucifixion, when he is lifted up on a cross.
In his soliloquy preparing for his approaching death he says, “I assure you that unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it can only be a single seed. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.” Jesus is about to be the grain of wheat that does not resist falling into the ground; the seed that does not cling to its own life, but allows itself to die, knowing prodigious new life can then emerge. As we will sing in the last hymn today, only when the single grain falls into the earth and dies will the green blade rise.
Jesus’ meditation continues. “Those who love their lives will lose them, and those who hate their lives in this world will keep them forever.” Those who tenaciously grasp what they think is essential, lose the very life they so desperately desire to preserve. And those who grow suspicious of what the world values and leave it to search for something better, find life bigger than themselves that does not end. Jesus seems to be reassuring himself, preparing himself for what he must do, reciting his beliefs in the face of his own counter-desire to avoid the cross. He is thinking it through, counting the cost, and reminding himself of what’s at stake. Those who follow him will have to do the same. If they decide to follow, the Father will honor them.
In the next scene his turmoil becomes painfully obvious. The scene has the same feel as the Garden of Gethsemane in the three synoptic gospels. We hear him say, “Now I am deeply troubled. What should I say? ‘Father, save me from this time?’ No, for this is the reason I have come to this time. Father, glorify your name!”
When Jesus says “Father, glorify your name!” he resolves his dilemma. He embraces the place of the victim. He will go through with it. He will become the one cast out, the one toward whom all fingers point in accusation, the stone the builders reject. He will show us what we do to each other by allowing us to do it to him. In this act he will reveal the depth of God’s love and glorify God’s name.
“Father, glorify your name.” Is he pumping God up like a balloon gone soft; praising God because God’s ego has become a little deflated? No, he wants to undo what we have done. We have projected who we are onto God and then said we are afraid of the God of our own projection. Having done that, we now see God as a tyrant and undesirable. Jesus has come to turn all of that around.
When Jesus prays, “Father, glorify your name,” he is expressing his willingness and determination to redeem God’s false reputation among us even though he knows what it will take. To glorify God’s name is to make the name desirable so that others will desire it too. Jesus wants to disclose who God really is to our world, to both the religious and non-religious. The world has a false notion of God. They fear him but they don’t love him or desire him. Jesus prays to make his Father’s name desirable. To do that, he will have to be lifted up in a particular way so that all will see human treachery and divine forgiveness. Only then will God’s name be cleared and the real culprit identified.
The prophet Jeremiah many centuries before tells his people that a time is coming when God will make a new covenant with his people. It won’t be like the one he made with them that they broke. It will be different because this time God will “put his instructions within them and engrave them on their hearts.” The engraving process has begun and the carving process centers on the events of Holy Week. The cross is how God writes his truth on our hearts. This is where he shows us who he is in a way that impacts us to our core and takes us further toward himself than any set of rules can ever take us. Jeremiah foresees that God “will forgive their (our) wrongdoing and never again remember their (our) sins.” While Jeremiah sees that it will happen, the gospels tell us how it happens, how the “glorification” comes to pass and it is breathtaking in scope. In the coming two weeks we will see it played out before our eyes.
In a portion of scripture easy to overlook, a section equivalent to Jesus’ transfiguration in the synoptic gospels, a voice from heaven responding to Jesus says something to the effect of “in you I have glorified my name, and I will glorify it again when you are lifted up on a cross.” It’s an awesome moment; an event filled with meaning that rings to the core of human need. The voice tells us that Jesus has glorified God and has God’s full blessing and soon, when he is lifted up, Jesus will again glorify God’s name by showing us who God is.
Some in the crowd hear it and say its thunder. Others say, “An angel has spoken to him.” The non-religious think it a phenomenon of nature. The religious think it the voice of an angel. Both are wrong for it is the voice of God validating what Jesus is about to do.
Then Jesus says a very strange thing. “Now is the time for judgement of this world.” The judgement is about to begin. It doesn’t occur at the end time and neither Jesus nor God does it. The judgment of the world is Jesus on the cross. We judge ourselves when we hang him there. The truth we have hidden; that we humans keep peace by diminishing, excluding and killing those we deem evil; that truth about us will soon hang on a cross before us. And this time we won’t be able to say God told us to do it because it is God’s son who is hanging there. We thought a distant and angry God would judge us but it turns out we judge ourselves by how we judge Jesus.
“Now this world’s ruler will be thrown out.” Jesus, in dying, throws out the ruler of this world. The ruler, who is the scapegoating mechanism itself, always based on misrecognition of the truth, loses its seat of privilege. This ruler lives by pointing the finger but when the finger-pointing mechanism has been exposed it no longer works and the seats of power unhinge. The spell is broken. The cross reveals Jesus, the forgiving victim, who laid bare the underpinnings of violence and revealed God’s forgiveness and mercy as the underlying truth.
Jesus ends his meditation by saying, “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to me.” Everyone gets attracted. That fascination/repulsion thing gets worked through and everyone sees the character of God and is drawn toward him. We look forward to that day. It’s the day toward which all history moves. Amen.