Draw All People Unto Myself (Lent 5B)

“Draw All People Unto Myself”

Fifth Sunday of Lent (Year B)
25 March 2012; 8 am Spoken Mass; 10 am Sung Mass
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon  

The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson

Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51:1-13; Hebrews 5:5-10; John 12:20-33

Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, "Sir, we wish to see Jesus." Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. Jesus answered them, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, 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. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.  Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say-- `Father, save me from this hour'? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name." Then a voice came from heaven, "I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again." The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, "An angel has spoken to him." Jesus answered, "This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself." He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die. (John12:20-33)

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

My second son David was very precocious.  He occasionally asked very hard questions. When he was about nine, he said, “Why did God have to kill his Son Jesus to pay for our sins? Doesn’t that make him a very bad Father? Why couldn’t he have just been bigger-hearted and forgiven us when we’re sorry? Isn’t that what he expects from us? Besides that—didn’t he forbid human sacrifice? And it all seems so unfair, even if Jesus agreed.”

I tried answering him by citing the normal “Law versus Mercy” and “need for an eternal atoning sacrifice” used by people who quote scripture without wrestling with it.  But David would have none of it,” “Look,” he said, “if God is really in charge of everything, he can make things the way he wants. So why did he make them so that he had to kill off his own Son?” 

It was several years before I got the tools needed answer his question: the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation, of God becoming flesh and dwelling among us in the person of Jesus.  These mean that in a real sense God the Father did not have to “kill off” his Son to satisfy some law he had set up.  

Rather, the death of Jesus on the cross “for our sins” was in fact God himself giving himself freely to heal us and rescue us from our own failings and shortcomings and all their effects. St. Paul phrases what he thought was going on in the life and death of Jesus in this way, “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, no longer counting against them their over-stepping of bounds, but rather giving to us what it is that reconciliation really means” (2 Cor 5:19). 

Today’s Gospel reading describes a scene that is a turning point in the Gospel of John. Several times previous to this, John has said that things we expect to occur in the story didn’t happen right then because, Jesus’ “hour had not yet come” (John 2:4; 7:30; 8:20).  With the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem, and with the coming of Greeks asking to see him, suddenly Jesus declares that “the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all portray Jesus’ suffering and death as the painful but necessary prelude to his being raised in glory from death.   But for the Gospel of John, Jesus being raised up on the cross itself is the moment of true glory. John’s Jesus in today’s Gospel uses a parable to describe this: “unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”

The passage from Hebrews we read today says that “Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears,” for God to “save him death”  (Hebrews 5:5-6).  The three other Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—describe Jesus the night before his death begging in prayer in Gethsemane to be spared from the cross, and ultimately accepting “not my will, but thine.”   But John’s Gospel omits any prayer in Gethsemane. Rather he has Jesus say in today’s reading, “What shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’?  No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name!’”

Last week, we saw that John’s Gospel portrays looking to Jesus lifted up on the cross the means of salvation just as Moses’ serpent lifted on a pole was a means of healing.   Again, in today’s reading, John’s Jesus says, “But when I am lifted up from the earth,” that is, lifted up on the cross, “I will draw all people to myself." Just as Paul says God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, John says Jesus on the Cross draws all people to him. 

Now the fact is, some people get very uncomfortable when you point out that the four Gospels tell very different stories about Jesus, and that John's Gospel tells a story that is in great part at odds with the other three's version.

But I have always taken this as an occasion for great hope. You see, Christians were a diverse lot from the very beginning. The ministers of the Word and the Gospel writers who told these stories so close to the actual events made the stories their own and let themselves be moved by the Spirit in ways appropriate to each of them.

And the Church has not insisted that we harmonize this, or censor all the versions into one. The Church has let the four Gospels stand in glorious disharmony, wonderful diversity. “I will all draw all people unto me,” says Jesus here. That means the Church ought to have diversity, ought to have a variety of keys in which the Gospel tune is played.

Because of the Church's history of identifying heresy and trying to control it, we often lose sight of this. It is important to remember that as the early Church sought to define its faith, there were individuals who wanted to eliminate all diversity and possible disharmony in scripture. Some, like Marcion, wanted to get rid of the Old Testament. It was just too distasteful for him.  Others wanted to reduce the New Testament to a single theological viewpoint.  One of these was Tatian the Syrian who created a single harmonized Gospel (the Diatesseron) and wanted it to be recognized as Scripture instead of the Four Gospels the Church finally settled on.

The Church Fathers, seeking to truly reflect the deposit of faith given in the apostolic age, declined Tatian's offer and rejected his single Gospel along with several other Gospels that bore the marks of having come from a period after the first couple of generations of Christians. The apostolic faith thus defined included the diversity we see in the New Testament.

So how does this relate to how it is that that it was for us that Jesus died? 

Though the early Church defined our doctrine of Christ and the Godhead in numerous councils and the creeds that we recite to this day, and though it defined which books were reliably recognized as God’s Word and which ones weren’t, the Church never defined the mystery of Christ’s suffering on Cross. 

The undivided Christian Church has never defined its doctrine of the atonement.  The Nicene Creed says that it was "for us and our salvation" that Christ came down from heaven and became fully human, and that it was “for our sake” that he was crucified.  But it does not tell us how this was so.  In one of the earliest recorded statements of Christian faith, St. Paul quotes the tradition he had received from earlier Christians: “Christ died for our sins"  (1 Cor 15:1-5), but again, does not tell us what he means by this.  Does it mean, “as a result of how badly we treated him,” or “in order to accept the punishment for our individual violations of God’s Law,” or “in order to correct our tendency to go astray by his good example,” or “by accepting our lot of being subject to and part of an unfair world,” or something else? 

We Christians, in all our variety and diversity, have given various answers to the question.   Some today would say that substitutionary punishment is the only way this can be seen.  My nine-year-old son’s image of the child-abusing, murderous Father-God is, alas, all-too-common.

But it is wrong. My son’s questions ring true to me, and cannot be discounted as a naughty choirboy’s dirty joke. 

The myth of redemptive violence is common in our world today.  In movies, we want the good guy to blow away the bad guys and make things right.  In our foreign and military policies, we think that violence, applied in a smart and timely fashion, will fix things.  In our criminal justice, we think that executing a murderer somehow fixes things.   But violence does not make things right. 

I do not believe the doctrine that Jesus suffered violent punishment on our behalf, in our stead, to save us from getting it ourselves from an angry, vengeful Deity.   It is a twisted and wrong image, seen through the narrow and distorted lens of human limitation.

The birth, life, death, and bodily reappearance of Jesus in victorious glory after his death is actually the Great Mystery of Love Himself descending below all things to save, redeem, and heal his pitiful creatures from the nasty fix we find ourselves in.

And in this pain-filled yet joyous mystery, the Cross stands central. 

In a 10th century North African hymn, we see the way some Africans have reflected on the theme of today’s Gospel reading, the cross of Jesus as the moment when glory, salvation, and hope arrived for us:

The cross is the hope of Christians
the cross is the resurrection of the dead
the cross is the way of the lost
the cross is the savior of the lost
the cross is the staff of the lame
the cross is the guide of the blind
the cross is the strength of the weak
the cross is the doctor of the sick
the cross is the aim of the priests
the cross is the hope of the hopeless
the cross is the freedom of the slaves
the cross is the power of the kings
the cross is the water of the seeds
the cross is the consolation of the bondmen
the cross is the source of those who seek water
the cross is the cloth of the naked.
We thank you, Father, for the cross.

Note here that the theology of the cross is not one of sorrowful suffering, but rather of triumphant life even within suffering. And that is how St. John sees the “Hour for the Son of Man to be lifted up, to be glorified.”  While not minimizing the sufferings of our Lord nor the hardships each of us faces in this world, this theology of the cross is one of joyous and loving mystery.

As we begin our final preparations for Holy Week, Good Friday, and Easter, may we reflect on Jesus’ love for us, and see in it God the Father’s love for us as well.  May we be more comfortable with diversity and differences, with change and new things.  And, with Jesus, may we welcome the whole world, whom our Lord, this God on the Cross, draws unto Himself.

In the name of Christ, Amen.