Have you ever just felt it was time? That the moment had come? That whatever you’d been waiting for, or
whatever you had to do, its time had arrived?
That’s happened to me before . . . when I began thinking seriously about
seminary, Pam and Mike and I went to one of Columbia Seminary’s Inquirer
weekends, where they clean up the campus, trot out their best-looking students
and put on a dog-and-pony show, and we were duly impressed and all, but when we
came back, we’d decided that we’d have to postpone it indefinitely, that we
weren’t in a position to do it right away . . . and then, that Summer, I went
to Africa, and everything changed, and when I came back, I knew that it was
time, that we should go sooner, rather than later . . . and looking back on it,
I can see the things that propelled us forward, though it was harder at that
time . . .
Jesus had a keen sense of the moment, a keen sense of when it
was time . . . back at the wedding at Cana, when his mama came to him
and told him “They have no wine,” Jesus said “Woman, what concern is that to
you and to me? My hour has not yet come”
. . . and Mary – I imagine with a heavy sigh – said “Do whatever he tells
you.” And the hands of people plotting
against him were stayed twice because, as John tells us, his hour—his Kairos, his time—had not yet
arrived. But now, Jesus can see the
writing on the wall, he knows that it’s time, that in his words “The hour has
come for the Son of Man to be glorified,” and as usual, the disciples didn’t
have a clue, but looking back on it, we can see what must have prompted him . .
. things were closing in: the temple
authorities were planning to kill him and just ten verses ago, they’d planned
to put poor old Lazarus to death because he’d been raised from the dead by
Jesus. At the same time, increasingly
large numbers of people were coming to him, and we know it wasn’t supposed to
happen that way, that his glorification wasn’t until after the cross,
that it didn’t mean earthly crowds following him around and praising him – not
just yet, anyway. Even the Pharisees were aware of it – they’d iust said they could do nothing because
“the whole world has gone after him.”
And as if to prove them right, along come some Greeks – they represent
the nations, those who are other-than-Jewish – some Greeks come to worship at
Passover, and they ask to see him.
They’re not satisfied with just the signs, or hearing about him – they
want to experience the man
himself. And the coming of the Greeks,
the flocking of the nations to him is the final sign that things are coming to
a head, and he tells them the hour has come.
Last week we read about Jesus “being lifted up” – as in on a
cross – and exalted, and we said a key to the whole thing, at least here in
John, is people seeing for themselves the
word of God, and even though the disciples didn’t understand the double meaning
of being lifted up and displayed like the bronze serpengt, we do . . . and we
know that Jesus’ glorification is a double-edged sword, that for him it
entailed being nailed to a cross and suffocating to death . . . and he goes on
to explain it with agricultural language – “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.” Although we know different,
the ancients believed that a planted seed actually dies before it
germinates, so what he’s saying is that unless a seed is planted, unless it dies,
it will not bear fruit. And of
course, he’s talking about his own death, which he now knows is eminent.
But what does he mean by “fruit?” Carrying the metaphor further, a seed
produces a tree or a grapevine, which produces generation after generation of
fruit . . . and the fruit in each generation are connected to every other fruit
by branches, via their connection to the central stalk or trunk . . . and later
on in John, Jesus likens himself to that central stalk, and so the
picture of what Jesus’ death produces is a tree, or a vine, bearing fruit, with
Christ at the center of it all . . . and notice that fruit on a tree are not
independent, all are connected to each other through the stalk, all are
connected through Christ. Notice that
this is a picture of the church, not
individual salvation. What Jesus will
produce by his glorification – by his lifting-up/exaltation – is the church.
And we in the church are like the individual fruit – we are in
relationship one with another, in communion with one another, and we’re
all held together by Christ.
But what is the mode of operation of this community? How are they to function in this
arrangement? How are Christians to live
in a community centered on Christ? Well,
the first hint is in Jesus’ next line, that those who love their life will lose
it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life .
. . here the Greek word for life is psyche – and does that ring a
bell? It means more than just physical
life, it means “self” or “soul” or “being,” and so participation in this
connected community of Christians entails not loving yourself, not being
self-centered, or psyche-centered . . . and it makes sense, doesn’t
it? How can our lives be centered in
Christ if they are centered upon ourselves?
How can we be Christ-centered if we are George-centered or Kate-centered
or Rick-centered? And those who would serve Christ, and not the self, must
needs follow Christ, and they will be
with him wherever he goes . . . they will be with him eternally . . . and God
will honor them . . .
And so the promise of Christ is the promise of relationship with
Christ and through Christ—who after
all, is the glue, the divine core of
all creation—the entire created—and uncreated—realm. And it’s no less a relationship with our
fellow Christians, our fellow fruit on the branches of the Christ-tree. . . we
are caught up together in the eternal, Trinitarian dance of the Father and the
Son and the Holy Spirit, the Creator, the Redeemer and the One Who Comforts and
empowers, weaving and bobbing in a resurrection two-step, in the intricate romp
of life . . . but there is pain there as well, there is pain and grief and
heartache . . . for loss is our constant companion – and is it God’s as
well? Surely Jesus felt it, we
hear his pain in the Garden – take this cup, father – and right here in our
passage as well . . . his soul, his psyche is troubled . . .
“shall I say: Father, save me from this
hour?” Save me from the agony to
come? But no, he says, no it is for this
hour that I have come . . . and acknowledging the necessity, he cries out to
heaven: “Father, glorify your name.”
Immediately, there is booming, crashing . . . and the people say that
it’s thunder, or an angel, but Jesus knows better . . . Jesus knows that it’s
God, affirming God’s will . . . I will
glorify my name, says the thunder, and Jesus’ knows it’s a death-knell.
From the death of Jesus, comes the life of the church, the life
of Christians everywhere, and this tension, this sublime paradox of life
from death, from pain and suffering, is at the center of the Christian walk,
and perhaps all of human existence, as well . . . and we’ve all been there,
we’ve all felt so low, so depressed that no matter what we did, no matter how
we acted, we couldn’t pull out of it.
T.S. Elliot called these times the “lesser deaths”; theologian Teilhard
de Chardin called them “diminishments.”
Sometimes we’re so down it’s almost physically painful, and our
inclination is to keep ourselves busy, to frantically get involved with
something, to get to work, to take our minds off it . . . but that just
prolongs the pain, and it sneaks up on little cat’s feet and smacks us with
claws extended, full in the face . . .
Little deaths almost always involve loss – loss of a loved one,
loss of face, loss of our own sense of self, of who we are . . . the
ancients tell a story of a mother whose little boy dies, and she is wild with
grief, just inconsolable with it, and all her friends try to help her, they try
to comfort her, but she tells them that unless her son is brought back to life,
she cannot be consoled. So she goes to
the doctor, but he can’t help, and she goes to the village elder, but she sends
her away, and finally she comes upon the hut of an old monk, living deep in the
forest, and she asks him if he can bring her son back to life, and he says
“Certainly,” and she cries out “What do I have to do?” and the monk says “Go
back to the village, and bring me a cup of milk from a family that has never
known suffering.” And she thinks of all
her happy neighbors – certainly much happier than she – and thinks “This ought
to be easy,” but as she goes from house to house she hears tales of grief and
sorrow from even the liveliest families, she hears story after story of pain
and heartache. No matter how full of life they seem, it has not always been
that way. And so she goes back to the
Monk and he asks her “Could you not find one family without suffering to give
you a glass of milk?” “No,” she says
“and now I understand that there’s no life without suffering, and no suffering
that cannot be overcome.”
Our bright and shiny culture teaches us to avoid pain, it tells
us that suffering is altogether bad, and you should avoid it at all costs, and
there’s plenty of products out there to help us in this effort, to help those
who can afford it, anyway . . . and if suffering should come, doggone it, you
just go see your favorite doctor and he’ll give you something that’ll
ease that pain, and if he won’t,
there’ll be someone who will, who’ll take care of it for you. But suffering is woven into the fabric of
life . . . we can no more avoid the little
deaths than we can our final
death. And I think that it’s up to us
how we respond, what we make of it.
We’ve all known people who’ve been eaten up inside . . . they seem to
collapse in on themselves. We try to
comfort, we use words like “I know how you feel” or “It’s always darkest before
the dawn,” but it doesn’t help, and they become a shell of their former selves,
their former psyches. People
recover in their own times, or sometimes not at all.
But the Jesus-story is emblematic of the universal, because from
his death came life. From his story came
the church, and the eternal connection of its members one with another, held
together by the cosmic Christ. And Christ’s
story is the seminal story, the basic
story, maybe the basic story of creation . . . it’s etched in the
seasons, in the following of day from night, day from night. And it’s through this basic story, and
through our realization of Christ at the center of it all, that we can begin to
deal with all the little deaths, all the heartache and pain, that lead up to
that final day. Paul called it hope, and
just as we have hope of our final resurrection, we can have hope that from our
sufferings, new life can spring. All we
have to do is keep our eyes on the prize, keep our eyes on Christ.
Now, I know that this sounds like a load of pious clap-trap,
like “suffer the pains and sorrows of this vale of tears, in hopes of eternal
life by-and-by” . . . and while that’s
true, we can learn to see the life from our little deaths a bit sooner than
that . . . we can learn to listen for Christ, to listen to Christ who
is, after all, in everything. And
although there are many ways of putting it, I like the way St. Benedict framed
it almost fifteen-hundred years ago.
It’s embedded in his whole philosophy, but best seen in the three
Benedictine vows. The vows of stability,
obedience, and change of life . . . we are to remain in our grief, to own
it, not avoid it, but at the same time listen – which is the basic
meaning of obedience – to the voice of God in everything around us. We’re to listen to the whisper in the trees .
. . life . . . life . . . life, and the babble of our friends and
neighbors, who are, after all, Christ to us, and by-and-by we’ll learn the way
out, the way of life, what form new life is to take . . . and then, we’re to let
God move us there, be open to the change in our lives, the new life in
whatever form it is presented.
What form this new life takes varies with each of us, and with
the particular form of diminishment we experience – Christ, after all, loves us
as individuals. Whenever I do something
truly stupid – it happens a lot – I have a tendency to brood over it, to
wrestle with it, to be depressed over it, sometimes for days. But if I can manage to keep open to Christ,
he will show me the way of life. Many
times, it’s a life-lesson, something I have to take to heart, to
learn. In the case of grief over a lost
loved one, new life may simply be a dawning acceptance, an accommodation,
literally a new life without the deceased.
Whatever the case, whatever the circumstance,
Jesus has shown us the way, he has demonstrated it in his life, and in
his death, and in his coming resurrection.
He has shown us the way of life, and fashioned for us a new creation . .
. because from his death comes the Church, the body of Christ on earth, and the
connection of all believers one to another, and to Christ our redeemer through
all eternity. Amen.
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