Jeremiah 31:31-34, Psalm 51:1-13, Hebrews 5:5-10, John 12:20-33
“Sir, we wish to see Jesus,” famously said the Greeks. Whether they ever did see him we are not told. We get the impression that once their request got to Jesus, he did not bother to meet up with them. We are told that Jesus took their request as a sort of rubicon, a defining moment, the confirmation of his choices and his doom. He says, “The hour has come.”
But we are not told why Jesus took their request that way. What I surmise is that the Greeks represent the world, the larger world outside Israel, and they confirmed in him that the world was ready for him—or that he was ready for the world.
The world had been on his mind since at least his conversation with Nicodemus three years earlier, from which we heard last Sunday. He had said, “God so loved the world,” and that “God sent his son into the world not to condemn the world but that the world through him might be saved.”
Don’t take that for granted, because his terminology represents a controversial choice on his part, a doom, a deadly choice. He had not said, “God so loved Israel,” nor that “God sent his son into Israel not to condemn Israel but that Israel through him might be saved.” But that’s what you should expect him to have said, considering such prophecies as Jeremiah’s, who promised that God would make a new covenant with the House of Israel—not with the world! When God said, “I was their husband,” that meant that God was the lover of Israel. God’s love was for Israel, not the world.
But the Lord Jesus, as early as his talk with Nicodemus, apparently made his complex choice to be a Messiah for the world. Fine. But that entailed him being a failure as the Messiah of Israel. In that sense, Our Lord was a failure. And that troubled him, even though he believed in the choice he was making. Just because you’re choosing what you believe doesn’t mean it won’t trouble you. You grieve the loss of other possibilities, you grieve your losing the life you enjoy, and losing your loved ones. The right choice is often the grievous choice. Jesus knew what it meant when he said that “If you love your life you’ll lose it.”
He failed as Israel’s Messiah. He lost to the Romans. He failed to establish his kingdom of peace for his own people. His teaching failed to persuade the thousands of people that he miraculously fed, and at the end only 120 people were still loyal to him. He was a loser, he went down in shame instead of glory. It troubled him, that he’d have to accept them killing him, but he had made his choices, and his doom was to plant his death, like a seed, in the fertile ground of God’s future.
Despite his grief he was resolved. Maybe because of his grief he was resolved. He said, “What should I say, Father, deliver me? No, Father, glorify your name.” That was what the Epistle to the Hebrews called his reverent submission to his Father. Not submission like groveling surrender, but submission like you submit your proposal, you submit your manuscript, you submit your best work.
He made his reverent submission and then, like an unexpected thunderclap, his Father vindicated him. Didn’t explain him, didn’t convince the crowd, but certainly did vindicate his choices and his doom.
Then Jesus shared his vision, his vision of himself, which he held before himself as he made his complex choices. He said, “And I, when I am lifted up, will draw all people to myself.” Lifted up, like on a Roman cross? Yes. But also lifted by his Father up from death. Also lifted up to heaven at God’s right hand, presiding over all the world and drawing all people to himself.
His lifting up is the last one of our signs of God. He’s lifted up like a signpost. The sign is not his cross so much as him who is up on it. The sign is your own mental image of him, and, like those Greeks who had wanted to see him, you have to be satisfied with your mental image of him, your image of him that you draw from the testimony of the witnesses and the memoirs of the apostles. His sign for you is how you envision him in your hope and in your longing.
He is a complex sign. He recapitulates the other signs of God that we have seen this season of Lent.
He is lifted up like that bronze serpent that Moses put up on the pole, so that everyone who gazes on him is healed.
He is raised up like the temple three days after it was broken down, that is, the temple of his body, his embodied life of ethical obedience, the house for God that he had built by his lifelong obedience to the Ten Commandments, the obedience he learned through what he suffered.
He is lifted up on the cross by the jeering Romans soldiers, who stripped him naked to expose his circumcision, thus to shame him and all the other Jews. But as Hebrews says elsewhere, that’s the sign “that he despised the shame—for the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross and despised the shame.”
He is lifted up from the earth like the rainbow, that sign of God for Noah and the animals, that bow-and-arrow aimed back up at God’s own heart, God saying “cross my heart and hope to die,” the sign of God’s all-in commitment to every living creature, that God freely takes personal responsibility for all the sin and evil of the world, and even takes the rap for it, though sin and evil come from us, not God. Way back at the rainbow God had committed to that doom, and now the hour has come.
Jesus is the sign of God’s identification with humankind, for better or worse, in life and death, with nothing held back. And thus the Incarnation, so that God should die! Because if God, who is pure spirit, had not become a human being, then God could not die. But why should God have to die? Because of God’s commitment to take the rap for evil and the penalty for sin. It was to be able to die a human death that God became a human being. How awful.
And yet how wonderful and mysterious is God’s answer to the problem of evil in the world, and it challenges our expectations. The No, No, No of humanity is answered by the Yes, Yes, Yes of God, but more than that, this Yes of God rises from the world as Yes to God from the life of someone who is genuinely human.. As Hebrews says, “Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.” The Yes of Jesus is both the Yes of God and the Yes to God, said both ways in loving commitment even unto death.
So Jesus did not die a sacrifice to senseless evil, though sensible evil took him as its victim. He died a sacrifice for righteousness, but not a victim of righteousness, rather a sacrifice for righteousness just as a seed is a sacrifice for the plant rises from it. He sacrificed for justice as an investment in justice. The Romans took him as a victim, but he was really the priest who offered up the sacrifice of himself. He was no victim, he wasn’t even a guinea pig, he was the pioneer and perfecter. Jesus is the sign that points to this way as the right way, to take the risk, even at the cost of suffering, that righteousness and justice are worth the risk to gain the future of God.
He was lifted up on the cross as the priest of his own sacrifice. As a priest he offers up to God the guilt of the world that he takes upon himself. He also offers up to God the grief of the world, he offers his prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears, the misery of the world and the anguish of humanity, your fear, your isolation, your frustration, your longing, and even your rage, crying out to God. “Why have you forsaken us? Why have you allowed all this? Why have you created us?”
Hebrews says that he was heard, that his prayers were heard. And yet he was not spared, he was not rescued. He was allowed to fail, to fail as the Messiah of Israel. Even in his failure he was the sign, the sign that it’s precisely in our failure that God meets us. God meets us human beings in the terrors and trials of time and circumstance.
Does God recognize failure? Yes, if your failure is that point where God meets you. I’m not saying that God ignores your prayers. I’m inviting you to believe that God suffers with you whatever suffering you pray about. God accompanies you through it.
With all the misery and suffering of the world that we keep praying about, you might conclude that Jesus has also been a failure as the Messiah of the world. Where is the Messianic age? But I invite you to believe that Jesus is the sign that God is willing to go the whole way with humanity, to not cut short human history and development and cultural creativity, to give humanity lots of time and room and freedom to do what it wants in the world and seek its destiny, and God patiently and lovingly suffers us.
Suffers us, not endures us. Suffers us without resenting us, suffers us and speaks to us, suffers us and enlightens us, suffers us and writes God’s words upon our hearts. I invite you to believe in this kind of salvation, I invite you to believe in this kind of strategy of God, this motivation for prayer, and I invite you to believe that this grand strategy of God is the expression of God’s own self-denying love for the world, God’s self-sacrificing love for humanity, and God’s joyful love for you.
Copyright © 2018 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
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