“Draw All People Unto Myself”
Fifth Sunday of Lent (Year B)
21 March 2021; recorded for Diocese of Oregon preaching rota
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland, Oregon
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51:1-13; Hebrews 5:5-10; John 12:20-33
I preached this for the Diocesan preaching rota for use in zoom services, and posted it on Tuesday, The Rev. Deacon Meredith Pech preached at Trinity this Sunday: a profound and moving meditation on the sin of racism that responded in many ways to the anti-Asian and mysogynistic murders in Atlanta on Wednesday. It will be posted separately on the Trinity Website, Here is the recording I did for the Diocese:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/16J8sFyPNuBmDr8y-MPirjxHbOmlBAzwQ/view?usp=drivesdk
God, take away our hearts of stone
and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
The scene in today’s reading from John is a turning point in that Gospel. Several times previous to this, Jesus defers saying or doing something because, “his hour had not yet come” (John 2:4; 7:30; 8:20). With his final arrival in Jerusalem and the coming of gentile Greeks asking to be taught by him, suddenly Jesus here 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. 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.”
Today’s passage from Hebrews 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, but ultimately accepting “not my will, but thine.” But John’s Gospel omits any prayer in Gethsemane. It rather 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 of chosen ones saved from the massa damnata by following some esoteric practice and doctrine. Jesus’ 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 that talk of God’s wrath, of punishment, justice, and judgment, of one and only one strait and narrow path.
But the Gospel of John, for all its sectarian and at times anti-Jewish animus born of being put “out of the synagogue” (John 9:22), teaches that Jesus came to save, not to judge (John 3:17). And we must remember that 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, the Fourth Gospel understands declining to follow Jesus as 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 the idea of 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.
The Rev. Karl Rahner, SJ
The Opening Mass of the Second Vatican Council.
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: a person can live in God’s grace and be saved through Jesus even outside explicit Christian formulations. If people, whether Buddhist nun or Muslim imam, try to do the right thing, be right with whatever God they imagine, and follow their conscience, they might be considered anonymous Christians 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 foreign 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 such Christian inclusivity by 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 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.
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 versions.
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. “I will all draw all people
unto me,” says Jesus here. That means the Church ought to have diversity, a rich
variety of keys in which the Gospel tune is played.
Because of the Church’s past history of oppression of Jews, native peoples, racial
minorities, and women, because of its colonial proselytism, and because its
periodic efforts to identify and root out heresy, we often lose sight of this. But remember this: 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. But the Church, seeking to truly
reflect the deposit of faith given in the apostolic age, declined Marcion’s and
Tatian’s offers. They decided to keep
the Hebrew Scriptures and all four Gospels even as they rejected Tatian’s
Diatessaron 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 includes 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 all. May we be more comfortable with diversity and difference, with change and new things. And, with Jesus, may we welcome the whole world, without judgment. For it is they that our Lord, this God on the Cross, draws unto Himself.
In the name of God, Amen.
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