Draw all People Unto Myself (Lent 5B)

“Draw All People Unto Myself”

Fifth Sunday of Lent (Year B)
18 March 2018; 8 am Spoken Mass; 10 am Sung Mass
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon  

The Very Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

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

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

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 final 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 from 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 as the means of salvation for the broken, wicked world just as looking on the bronze serpent lifted on Moses’ staff 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.  This is not a few people, not some small percentage somehow graced by God choosing them and not the massa damnata, or who have followed some esoteric practice and doctrine, or have respected the right religious brand.    John’s words here give us hope that eventually all people, the world, everyone, will be drawn to Jesus and healed.

Some would object, saying God’s holiness is incompatible with universal salvation.  They point to passages of scripture and the liturgy that talk of God’s wrath, of punishment, of justice and judgment, and the only one strait and narrow path.      

But the Gospel of John, for all its sectarian and at times anti-Jewish animus borne of being put “out of the synagogue” (John 9:22), teaches that Jesus came to save, not to judge (John 3:17).   And, as I have preached many times from this pulpit, the idea “the wrath of God” describes more how we feel when we are estranged from God, not something about the heart of God, who is love itself.  1 John 4 teaches in love there is no judgment.  To be sure, declining to follow Jesus is for John a type of judgment in and of itself, since it is for now at least in fact rejecting the very source of our healing.  But John goes on:  Jesus on the cross is an ensign, a rallying point, who eventually will draw all to himself for healing. 

Others might object that Jesus drawing all to himself is an insult to other traditions, whether Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Baha’i, animist, shamanistic, or even atheistic.  This is true, if we understand this image in terms of a proselyting urge that says, join us or be damned.  But if we understand it as a loving desire to share with others the good we have enjoyed, without the demand that others change and become like us, it is not so.

  

Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner developed the doctrine of the Anonymous Christian, later adopted and promulgated as official Roman Catholic teaching by the Second Vatican Council.   The idea is that a person can live in God’s grace and attain salvation through Jesus even outside explicitly constituted or stated Christianity.  If a person, say a Buddhist nun or a Muslim imam, tries to do the right thing, be right with whatever God they conceive of, and follow his or her conscience and tradition, that person might be considered an anonymous Christian and be saved through Jesus’ victory over death and sin.  They would not have to explicitly accept Jesus or Christianity, or might even, because of circumstances and constraints, have rejected these explicitly.  But God’s universal salvific will and the greatness of God’s grace would save them too.

 

The idea is also found among Protestants. The final book of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Battle, has the character Emeth, a Calormene prince who had fought against Aslan and Narnia and served his own god, Tash.  He has done his best to live uprightly within the traditions he was raised in.  In the end, Aslan receives him as one of his own with these words, “I and [Tash] are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him.^”  Our Prayer Book teaches us to pray, “Remember all who died in the peace of Christ, and those whose faith is known to you alone; bring them into the place of eternal joy and light” (p. 375).

Again, some criticize this effort at Christian inclusivity saying that it is condescending:  “I’m Jewish, thank you very much, and do not want to become Christian, even anonymously.”   Fair enough, especially in light of historical Imperial Christian persecution of Jews, native peoples, and the non-conforming.    A tradition is truly inclusive only when it recognizes that other traditions have separate yet valid paths.  Accepting that God is bigger than our particular brand is an essential part of Jesus’ teaching.  Our hope that God is doing and will do for us more things than we can ask or imagine means that ultimately there is no conflict between trusting that Jesus will save all people and respecting the independence and truth of non-Christian traditions.  One of the things I liked most about what heard at the Havurah last week with the Rev. Matthew Fox is this:  we must all draw deeply from our own well, and rejoice in the river we share, recognizing that they carry the same life-bringing water. 

The four Gospels tell very different stories about Jesus, and as we have seen today, John's Gospel tells a story often at odds with the other three’s version.   I have always taken this as an occasion for great hope. You see, Christians were a diverse lot from the very beginning.   And the Church has not insisted that we harmonize or censor all competing stories about Jesus 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 oppressin of Jews, native peoples, and women, because of its colonial proselytism and identifying and trying to control heresy, 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, like  Tatian the Syrian, wanted to reduce the New Testament to a single theological viewpoint.   He created a single harmonized Gospel (the Diatesseron) that served as the Gospel lectionary in most of the Church for several centuries.  Tatian 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.

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 all as well.  May we be more comfortable with diversity and difference, 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 God, Amen.