March 21, 2021 John
8: 20-33 Rev. Peter Hofstra
In
our passage today, Jesus talks about his “Glorification”. When I think of Jesus being glorified, I
think of Jesus being raised up to sit at the right hand of God, to be the one
who judges us at the end of time. It is
the reward for what Jesus has done in carrying out God’s plan. But when Jesus is speaking today, he speaks
of his Glorification.
At
first glance, this looks like Jesus is going off on a preaching tangent. What is going on? It is Passover and there are Greeks-not
Jewish- in Jerusalem to worship. They
have heard of Jesus and they want to meet him.
So, through Philip, and then Andrew, this request is brought to the
Lord, and this is his response.
When
he wraps up the passage, in verse 32, Jesus says he will be lifted up to draw
all people to himself. My first thought,
when Jesus being lifted up to heaven by the Father-Ascension Day. But the passage ends with a clarifying
statement, Jesus was speaking about the kind of death he must endure, NOT about
the kind of reward he was to receive. So
this is NOT about Jesus being raised up to heaven. It has a much closer parallel to last week,
when Jesus was speaking to Nicodemus.
There, the Son of Man must be lifted up and that was clearly referring
to Jesus being lifted up on the cross!
His metaphor echoes this. He
speaks of the grain of wheat dropped into the ground, where it must die in
order to bear much fruit.
So,
to understand the glorification that Jesus speaks of here, we must understand
that it is tied to the death he is going to suffer-glory comes after, but it
comes at great cost, when he is lifted up on the cross.
In the
midst of this, Jesus confesses that he is troubled in the spirit by all of
this. I think if any of us knew that our
deaths were imminent and in such a horrible manner, “troubled in the spirit”
would be a massive understatement. Jesus
goes so far as to echo his feelings from the Garden of Gethsemene in Luke,
where he asks for the cup of wrath to be passed from him. Here, he asks the disciples if He should
appeal to God the Father to save him from what is to come? The question is rhetorical. The answer is NO. Coming down to die for us is the very reason
that Jesus came down to the earth. And
the results of this work, of his death, is going to be that Satan, the ‘ruler
of the earth’ is going to driven out from controlling this world. It is in that victory that Jesus’ death
blossoms into victory, into glory.
Why
did the request of the Greeks, of these people clearly identified as NOT being
Jewish, trigger this response? Is there
a disconnect? Or is something else going
on? It depends on what we think the
gospel is for. Our best guess is that
the gospels were written from the oral traditions of Jesus that were shared in
the worship and fellowship experiences of the early church. These churches had the disciples (now
apostles) establishing and leading them.
They knew there was a Second Coming of Jesus. But as it became evident the Second Coming
was further into the future than they realized, as the eyewitnesses to Jesus began
to die (many as martyrs), these oral traditions were written down and they were
organized into narratives for the church to know what Jesus has done for
us. The narratives in the gospels are
for the church to know what Jesus has done.
So,
in this case, the glory of Jesus, which comes through his death and
resurrection, which bears fruit like the grain of wheat that has died, which
comes through the driving out of the devil, all is in the context of non-Jews
coming to meet him. Which is what the
church became, a faith of non-Jews. I
believe John is tying together the Plan of God in Jesus’ death and
resurrection, pointing to Jesus’ glorification, as something explained because
of these Greeks precisely for their benefit, and our benefit, in knowing what
Jesus is doing for us, as our Savior.
Being recorded in the gospel, this truth is there for all Christians in
all seasons of life.
I
find this passage asking a hard question of us, right here and right now, in
our own collective walk of faith in Jesus.
It was through the valley of the shadow of death, death on the cross,
that Jesus saw glory coming to him. Can
we see the possibility of the glory of Christ coming through our church once
again, or have we passed so far, shrunk so much, that we are in the valley of
the shadow of death, destined to meet that end?
That
question has hung over this church since before my arrival. When Harborview was brought into this
building, what was the balance of reasoning?
Was it to be community resource to address the need of a lack of pre-K
educational programs in Perth Amboy? Was
it in the hopes that establishing a pre-school in the building would serve as a
funnel for neighborhood families into the wider life of the church? Was it for the possibility of making the
square footage of this large physical plant pay, in part, for its upkeep? I don’t think any one of those answers is
absolute. It is not either/or/or but
rather all these elements, and others, came into play as the future of the
church was considered. The overarching
question, taking all these elements into account, is what does our church, here
in Perth Amboy, do for Jesus?
Our
truth is that we are a commuter church, people drive to get here. Yet we are an urban location, so unlike a
suburban church that can sprawl with parking and a campus and all that, all the
confines of city life (parking, congestion, etc.) play against us. What can we draw from our Scripture this
morning? Have we the hope of passing
through a time like that of the grain of wheat that has to die before it can
bear fruit? Are we looking forward to
resurrection? Or just dying
comfortably? Are we content to simply
wait for ‘something’ to happen?
I am
frankly jealous of the church folks we have been in conversation with, looking
to transplant from Jersey City to Perth Amboy as their congregational base has
shifted. What freedom! If we were to try that, we’d been ‘invading’
the ‘territories’ of the Presbyterian Churches in Fords, in Avenel, in
Woodbridge, if we tried to center ourselves to where our folks live now.
To
add a little more, lets throw in the presumption about how leadership changes
take place. The tradition is that the
pastor who is leaving drops a bomb that is their exit upon the
congregation. The response of the
congregation is then to mourn, overseen by an interim pastor, through the stages
of grief, until they come to accept, at which time they can see ‘clearly’
(without emotional interference), the community around them and what needs to
be done to move forward (community study, mission statement, call process).
In
many cases, there is the ‘writing on the wall’ that a change is coming. Pastors retire, congregations are in
transition, neighborhoods change.
Instead of dealing with it head on, the presumption is that a pastor
leaving is death in a congregation and, as in the advice given to a person who
loses their spouse of many years, do not make any major decisions until you
have had time to work through the grief so we stay static until that all
happens.
But
that is not how Jesus frames it. He was
at the peak of his popularity when the Greeks came to call. He’d just come off the resurrection of
Lazarus, and that miracle fueled a whole lot of the enthusiasm that led to his
Triumphal Entry in Jerusalem. But Jesus
sees the writing on the wall. This very
popularity is going to make him, in the eyes of the Jewish leadership, too
powerful to let live. But Jesus frames
it that his glorification is going to come through this conspiracy that will
kill him, that the Messiah stepping out for the whole world to believe, comes
through this moment of pain and death, because the very power of Christ is that
He overcomes sin and death for all who believe.
So
here we are. We know there is an
endpoint, to the money, to the participation, to the relevance of being an
Anglo church in a LatinX community. What
conversations do we need to have about this?
The church model of transition is essentially ‘do nothing because you
have to mourn’. Jesus did not
mourn. He was troubled, certainly. There was pain and anguish, but his eye was
on the triumph to follow. Are we going
to sing till the last voice is extinguished?
Or do we grab onto the vision that resurrection comes through the pain
and anguish, and we can manage it, transition with it, plan in it, or we can
just let it kill us.
Jesus
says in this passage that those who love their life are going to lose it. This speaks to the people who do evil, who
love the darkness, again from last week’s passage. But if we hate our lives here, if we hate the
sin and evil in the world, if we hate how everything seems to be so horrible
around us, from pollution to COVID to corruption to poverty to terrorism, to us
comes the gift of eternal life.
Where
I strongly disagree with many Christians about when that happens. To many, the notion is ‘junk the world’, get
to the new one, the eternal one. But
they have missed the point of what truly happened with the death and
resurrection of Jesus. Death is no
longer a transition of what is and what is to come. Instead, it is more like a speedbump of the
journey of eternal life that begins now, at the moment of accepting Jesus as
Lord and Savior and Friend. Jesus died
on the earth, Jesus rose on the earth, then Jesus arose once again to
Heaven. His glory was NOT when he was
floating up to the clouds and waving the world “Good Bye”.
His
glory was wading into the worst of the filth of sin and evil and death and
punishment, drowning in it all himself, because then he rose up and out of it
once again. What are we going to do
about that? Are we going to celebrate
Palm Sunday and Easter as the triumph we have received in our own lives because
Jesus died and rose again for each of us?
Or are we going to do more? Are
we going to use Jesus as our model to embrace the pain, embrace the
difficulties that we are facing, true, not knowing the Endgame, but knowing
that the Lord is faithful, that the servants who follow him will be honored by
the Father? To quote Monty Hall, a
prophet unknown to the present generation, I recommend Door Number 2. Amen.
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