Last
week, we saw that in the Gospel of John, the phrase “eternal life” doesn’t mean
what we may have grown up thinking it meant.
Rather than being consonant with heaven, that is some place you go after
you die, it very much begins in the here and now, even though it does have an
eternal aspect or quality. We say that
anyone who is in a state of believing in Christ has eternal life, beginning on this life, right here on good, old Terra Firma. And what is this “eternal life,” that begins
right here on earth? That we live in
God’s hands, in harmony with God’s will or, as Jesus puts it, we “know
God.” And further, he speaks of the
judgment of those who aren’t believing
in him, and it's that they live in darkness, instead of the light. Thus, far
from being judged by God, they are judged by themselves, and their judgment is to live in darkness—i.e., to not know God.
This
week, we explore further this idea of judgment, only where last week we looked
at individual judgment, today we are
talking corporate judgment, the
judgment of the “world,” as it’s translated here. And we get another dose of Jesus’ theology of
the cross as interpreted here in John, and we can begin to see just how the
cross effects this judgment of the world.
And the first thing to notice is that, like last week, the time of year
this happens is Passover, but unlike
last week, it’s Jesus’ last one, it’s
his final Passover, just hour before
his death. And whereas last week he was talking to a Pharisee,
to Nicodemus, who was having the devil’s own time understanding him, here he’s
talking to insiders, to Andrew and Philip, to be precise, who have come to him
relaying the desire of a couple of Greeks to see him, and although the Greeks
apparently don’t get their wish, we—and
the disciples—get a lesson in just what is going on.
When
Andrew and Philip tell him that the Greeks want to see him, Jesus uses that as
an excuse to launch into one of his patented non-answers, which tend to be especially cryptic here in John: “Now
it’s time,” he says, “for the Son of Man to be glorified.” And we know from last week what he means: that the Son of Man be “lifted up” on the
cross. And he launches into an analogy to explain
what he means. You know, it’s like a
seed. If it doesn’t die—and here he’s
playing off the ancient belief that when a seed germinates it dies—if it doesn’t
die, then it just remains one seed. But
if it dies, then it produces abundant fruit.
That’s how he views his coming glorification, his coming death on the
cross: he is a seed who must die to produce fruit.
Now,
a seed is a beginning, but of what? What
is the fruit that will come from his death?
Well, it’s related to eternal life, to “knowing Christ”: “Those who love their life lose it,” he says,
“and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” And every time I read this, I say “wait a
minute . . . what the heck does that mean? Are we not supposed to enjoy life? Is life, as the old hymns go, just a veil of
tears, something to be endured? And
we’re supposed to hate it? Why were we put here if not to enjoy what God has given us?” Then I take a look at the Greek and it begins
to make a little more sense.
First
of all, this one verse seems to have
three instances of the word “life:” whoever loves their life will lose it, those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. And every English translation I can get my grubby little
hands on translates it like that. Life,
life, life. But that’s not the way a
speaker of Greek would’ve heard it, because the first two instances—where Jesus
says “those who love their life lose it and those who hate their life will keep
it”—are not the same word as the life
in “eternal life.” The first two
“life's” are, in Greek, are psu-ke, from
whence we get the word “psyche,” and the last one, the one in “eternal life,”
is zo-e, from whence we get the “zo”
in “zoology” or “zoo.” So substituting the
Greek, a first-century listener would’ve heard “Those who love their psu-ke lose it, and those who hate their
psu-ke in this world will keep it for
eternal zo-e.”
Now,
stay with me, here: psu-ke can be
translated as “life,” but it can also be “soul” or “self.” So, given that someone hating their own soul
doesn’t make a lot of sense, let’s substitute “self” for the first two instance
of life: “Those who love their self lose it, and those who hate their self in this world will keep it for
eternal life.” And this makes more sense, doesn’t it? Especially if we take “self” to be something
like the Freudian “ego” or perhaps, even, “psyche.”
But
wait, there’s more! This translation of
“world” is not as it seems. In Greek,
it’s kosmos, and the late New
Testament scholar Walter Wink has shown that in the Gospels and the letters of
Paul, it doesn’t mean the earth, as we might assume, nor does it mean “all of
creation” or “the created order.” Wink
has shown that kosmos refers to the
fallen realm that exists in estrangement from God and is organized in
opposition to God’s purposes. It’s a
mouthful, so let me repeat it: it refers to the fallen realm that exists in hostility
to God and is in opposition to God’s purposes. Perhaps the best translation of kosmos is “system,” and there is a
spirit that drives it that Jesus calls “the ruler of the world.”
So
what Jesus seems to be saying is that
those who love their self will lose
it, but anyone who hates their self
in this system, and taking the “in” seriously, we can expand on a little to
read “as a part of this system.” Those who hate their selves as a part of this
fallen system that exists in opposition to God’s purposes will keep their
selves for eternal life.
Whew! All that exposition for one, measly verse. But what does it mean to be “in the system” as Jesus put it? What does it mean to be a “part of” the
system? I think it's the opposite of being “in Christ,” the
antithesis of “abiding in Christ” or “putting on the mind of Christ,” as Paul put it.
And being in Christ means participating
in Christ, being a part of Christ’s purposes, as a branch is part of the
purpose of the stem, as Jesus puts it elsewhere in John, or for Paul, serving
as organs—as hands and feet and
livers and lungs—of the body of Christ.
As Jesus says in this passage, where he is, so will we, as his servants, be.
Now,
if being in Christ means to serve his
purposes, then being in the world, being in the system would mean to serve its
purposes, to participate in its actions.
And I suspect that if a person were asked “would you like to be a part of a
system that is ruled by a spirit that is opposed to God, and to participate in
its ways that are the antithesis of the ways of the divine?” she would say “no
way, not on your life.” But as Paul
knew, we don’t always have a lot of leeway, and it’s like we’re trapped, bound
by the spirits he calls the powers
and principalities. And so, as he put it
in Romans, we do not do what we want but do the very things we hate.
What
are some of the features of the kosmos,
the structures of the system that hold us captive and take us down the path of
death? Consumerism comes immediately to mind. How many of us consume and consume,
even though we know it’s not giving us life, and that it’s killing others in
sweatshops throughout the world? Domination is another way. We live in a kosmos shaped by hierarchies of winners
and losers, and it's often nigh onto impossible to think in other categories and
metaphors. And so our lives become
nothing more than striving-grounds to get ahead, to be better than our fellow humans, and the hierarchies morph into the structures
and institutions that perpetuate racism, sexism, and heterosexism.
And
then there’s the violence: the institutions and structures are perpetuated by
violence or the threat of it. The dominance
of whites over blacks is the example par excellence.
Shortly after the Civil War, it became
enshrined in law, and maintained by the full force of the law, by
police in riot gear and attack guards and live ammunition. And as we’ve seen in Ferguson and New York
and Cleveland, inequality is still maintained
by the barrel of a gun. As my old
preaching prof Chuck Campbell put it, the means the ruler of this world uses to
perpetuate the System are domination, violence and death.
An
I can hear you now: what a cheery subject, and indeed, it’s not any fun? Bit it is, after all, Lent, and here’s the thing:
after Lent comes redemption. After Lent comes hope. And Jesus speaks of that hope in this passage. “Now is the judgment of this world,” he says,
and once again it’s kosmos, or system. “Now the ruler of this system will be driven
out.” And how will that be accomplished? “When I am lifted up from the ground, I will
draw all people to myself.” As we saw
last week, being lifted up is Jesus’ euphemism for the crucifixion,
and so what he is saying is that the crucifixion will (a) cast out the ruler of
this system (almost like an exorcism) and (b) will bring all people to him.
My sister and niece came to
Tuscaloosa one year and wanted to see the real South, so we said “all right,
you asked for it” and took them down to Selma.
There, gracious ante-bellum homes coexist along side the worst signs of
the oppression of African Americans, crowned, of course, by the Edmund Pettis
Bridge. It’s named for a man who led a
band of terrorists called the Ku Klux Klan, and as we drove across, I could
feel the years of terror and pain embedded in its corroded steel. On the other side, the side away from the
money, there was a crude but loving tribute to that day fifty years age when
all the violence of the system was focused on a small band of marchers.
When the “powers-that-be” turned their
clubs on the marchers, the images were beamed across the nation, exposing the reality
of white racism to a shocked country. Lyndon Johnson was forced to take action, and
the voting rights act was born. Martin Luther King knew exactly what he was
doing: “Let them get their dogs,” he shouted, “and let them get the hose, and
we will leave them standing before their God and the world spattered with the
blood and reeking with the stench of their Negro brothers.” He knew it was necessary
“to bring these issues to the surface, to bring them out into the open where
everybody can see them.”
King learned that lesson from Jesus Christ, as did Mahatma Gandhi. As did Nelson Mandela. Jesus’ whole life was an enactment of the violent myth of the kosmos, refusing to respond in the
System’s own violent terms. In his trial before Pilate, he spells it out: “My
kingdom is not from this kosmos. If
my kingdom were from this kosmos, my
followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But
as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”
Brothers and sisters, what
happened on the cross was this: Jesus publicly and dramatically judged the
System by exposing it for what it is—an opponent of God’s purposes; not the way
of life, but the way of death. And by exposing the System in this way, Jesus
“casts out” its driving spirit; for once we have seen the System for what it
is, we begin to be set free from its ways. We are set free to die to a life shaped by the System, in
order to have eternal life, to know God in a life lived fully and freely in the
way of Christ. Amen.
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