No one understands the pain of an exile better than another exile, so when John begins
to give his accounting of the final days of Jesus' earthly life he includes the fulfillment of the "sign"
predicted so long before that the Gentiles would come to the light of God's glory. In this curious story of some
"Greeks" seeking the opportunity to see Jesus he tells us how his own alienated community of former Jews,
and all of us get to know God.
Everybody wants to get to heaven, but nobody wants to die. Everybody wants Easter, but no one wants the cross.
Death and suffering are clearly not something we can bypass…but most of us try to avoid the topics as long as we
possibly can. We try to keep these subjects outside the range of our daily experience, and thus they become the
"strangers" we would like not to meet.
We too would prefer to see Jesus in his earthly glory, popular, doing good works, and outwitting the current authorities
and powers that control the world, but the story of Jesus, and our own story, doesn't have that kind of a happy
ending…there is more!
When we were preparing for our recent trip to Ireland, just as in the previous journeys we have made together there
were opportunities provided to see videos, and attend lectures on the history of the land and people we would encounter.
Clearly reading and viewing videos are not quite the same as actually going to a particular place, but they are
important tasks as "preparations for the journey." Such disciplines certainly make any trip more worthwhile.
The same can be said for the study of Scripture and the power it can have over the way we encounter life. We tend
to take access to the written word as an archaic problem, since the flood of information via electronic media makes
everything so readily available. Interestingly with so much available to it, it is the current generation that
is facing a major crisis with literacy.
In previous times the people of God had to rely almost totally on an oral history with very little actually confined
to a parchment of carefully transcribed letters. The stone tablets of Moses were lost in the destruction of the
first Temple in 587 BC, and few communities were wealthy enough to have access to even one sacred scroll. So when
Jeremiah predicted a day when the covenant of God would be written on the heart it was tantamount to receiving
the promise of a new heaven and a new earth.
Alexander the Great brought a degree of unity to the ancient world by insisting that all the countries he conquered
learn a common language. The Romans built on that heritage and it is widely believed that Jesus, like most of his
contemporaries was equally fluent in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic. Those seeking to be cultured however would show
disdain for local dialects and speak only in the politically correct tongue, and so it was that the "Greeks"
approached Andrew, who along with Philip was one of the only two disciples to have Greek names.
Jesus' response to their request to see him, may at first seems strange to us. He did not say, "Sure, send
them right in," or "I'm busy now, but schedule them for next Tuesday." And that is all in keeping
with the story John wants to tell.
Instead, he talked about wheat falling to the earth and dying, about hating life in this world, and about serving
and following him. I am sure Andrew and Philip must have scratched their heads in puzzlement and then said, "Okay,…but
will you see them?" And Jesus, I imagine, may have responded, "That wasn't what they requested Andrew,…for
me to see them. They requested to see me."
"Okay, but do you have to be so technical Jesus? So they want to see you. Will you let them come into our
camp to see you or not?"
"I already answered that." But Andrew and Philip, still didn't get it, and sadly often neither do we.
Central to "seeing" Jesus, is seeing the cross. It is as we look to Jesus upon the cross that we are
drawn to be one with him. It is as we hear the message of the cross that His truth becomes ours. It is as we embrace
the cross for ourselves that we find life.
This passage follows right after the comment in verse 19, "Look how the whole world has gone after him!"
What is important to notice is that John is not interested in narrating the outcome of this particular quest to
see Jesus; it is simply a foil to stress the universal scope of Jesus' work, and the missionary direction the work
of his followers would take after the Son of man was glorified.
The Gospel of John and the letters of John were all written in Greek. The Johannine communities somehow identified
these inquiring Greeks as their own emergent nucleus, despite the fact that they did not belong to the original
following of Jesus. They saw themselves as those who were originally "not of this fold", but recognized
that Jesus had called them too, and they responded.
Four times John reported Jesus as saying "my hour has not yet come," and here in verse 23 he announces
that it has! That pivotal moment for John seems to be the arrival of these outsiders signaling the fact that his
message had begun to reach beyond his community to the gentiles and that eventually the light would shine into
all of humankind. In verse 32 Jesus truly begins to draw all people to himself.
As we head toward the end of our Lenten season, we see God doing familiar things in new and disturbing ways. The
People of God found in our scriptures are all familiar with the God who has made deals with them, agreements that
laid the ground rules for life under God's protection. Throughout Lent we've been recalling the ways in which those
same people went back on those deals, time and time again, but God remained faithful. In our Old Testament Lesson
God presents a new deal, to be sealed in a new way. With the People of God under Moses' leadership, commandments
were carved in stone. Under Abraham, the agreement with God was sealed with the sacrifice of animals cut in half.
In fact the _expression used in the original Hebrew always says that God "cuts a covenant."
But in this new deal that God is proposing the terms are to be inscribed directly into the human heart. From our
vantage point, in these days of elective cosmetic surgery, where tattoos, piercings, and other body markings seem
almost a requirement for fitting in, this may not seem like much of a deal. But consider our reaction to the surgical
patient recently in the news, who sued because a surgeon marked her insides with the logo of his alma mater without
her knowledge.
Choosing is one thing, but being forced to take a mark is quite another. We would consider it a violation of our
Christian freedom, a false claim that some part of us is actually owned by another. Yet we Christians have had
our own history of marking the bodies of those we've held captive. In the Thirteen American Colonies, Christian
slave holders had their slaves branded like cattle. In Hitler's Germany, National Socialists (Nazis), some of them
Christian, tattooed captive Jews with ID numbers. Christian soldiers in Bosnia carved crosses into the foreheads
of Muslim POWs.
Even those who undergo the process of bodily marking voluntarily sometimes find themselves in another place when
they no longer want the marks on their bodies. They pay a high price to remove them. Laser surgery on tattoos is
painful and expensive, and removing a brand only creates a new scar in its place.
So this new covenant with God is actually one tough proposition. A deal sealed by the carving of the Law into the
human heart, the center of human life. There is no external marking to identify God's people, only an inward identity,
proven in the Godward turning of the heart itself. In this new understanding, belief in God touches and tempers
the very heart of human desire, always turning the human creature toward the Creator God, no matter what that person's
life circumstance may be, and just as the believer will be recognized as God's own by this inward turning, God
is revealed in the holiness of the believer's life.
This entails for the believer an awesome responsibility. It means that the world will come to know our God because
of what they see in us.
Most like the sound of being "touched by God." It makes us feel so "special." But there's a
cost for that touch. It restricts our choices, dictates our preferences, and adds to our sphere of responsibility.
A part of who we were is taken away, claimed by an outside force!
My experience of life tells me that people get really angry when they perceive something has been taken away from
them which they regarded as theirs by right. Even Pilate perceived most accurately what was actually happening
when it is said: "he realized that it was out of jealousy that they had handed him over." (Matthew 27:18)
In all my years of being a pastor there has been the odd occasion when someone has made some comment about what
they thought was the proper role of a minister or priest. I suppose in the normal course of human society it is
hardly surprising that those who contribute to the paying of my salary should have some say in how I exercise my
ministry. But the gospel directs me to say that every self appointed position of power and authority be questioned.
My role is that which the Lord directs through my personal study of the scriptures, the traditions of the Church,
and participation in the sacramental life of the community of faith.
When I depart from this you have every right to dismiss my words. But our understanding of Christian calling indicates
that it is not a role to which I appointed myself, and therefore dismissal should come with careful discernment.
Being a minister is an incredibly privileged position where one is paid to explore one's faith and try to express
it to others. It is to be invited into the most intimate parts of people's lives, and the trick there is most often
to tread gently and without comment.
I say all this to suggest that the institution of the Church often suffers from an inherent schizophrenia, needing
to have an authority and structure, yet also knowing that authority and structure can be alienating.
In 16th century England, Thomas More and John Fisher, a chancellor and a bishop, died for their faith. They were
martyrs who were grains of wheat, willing to die for their principles and for the love of Christ. The odd thing
about their martyrdom in England is that so few others were willing to follow their example. Most thought that
the issue they were willing to die for was a trivial one, a temporary disagreement over ideology that would probably
reverse itself in time. A king who wanted to reject the authority of the Church to divorce and remarry.
But in less than 20 years, a Catholic country became a Protestant one, and no one seemed to think it was a very
important change. History has shown that it paved the way for persecutions that cost millions of lives, and denied
the simplest of life's pleasures to those of Catholic persuasion, fueling fires that continue to burn in places
like Ireland today. One could easily ask "Why were so many Germans willing to let the Nazis gain power?"
Or today, "Why do so many Americans allow TV to be so dreadful?"
More and Fisher saw the issue as heresy and a betrayal of the will of Christ who gave the keys to Peter and his
successors, who became the popes of Rome.
Can you in your wildest imagination think how desperately attractive a trip to Greece might have looked to Jesus
who was just a few days away from the cross? What if these "outsiders" proved more receptive than the
group he had been working with for the last three years?
But the choice was not his alone to make. There are words written on stone that barely scratch the surface…and
there are those inscribed in the heart that effect every pulse of blood that courses through the body enabling
life itself. Such words are stronger than our own, and claim a personhood that once was ours alone…but now belongs
to God.
Do you want to see Jesus…as an outsider? Or do you want Jesus to see you?
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