John 12:20-43. (March 29, 2015)
I.
We skip ahead to chapter 12 and pick up the story immediately after Jesus enters Jerusalem. When he comes into the city the Pharisees observe the scene in frustration, noting that “the world has gone after” Jesus. As an example of this, we next hear of some “Greeks” who had come up to Jerusalem for the Passover, and want to “see” Jesus. They approach Philip who tells Andrew. (These are the two disciples with Greek names.) They convey the message to Jesus.
But instead of responding to them, Jesus appears to understand this as the indication that the hour has finally arrived for him to be glorified. Now that his message and reputation have penetrated beyond Palestine, and a window has been opened to the rest of the world in these Greeks, people from some other parts of the Mediterranean basin, Jesus knows that it is time for him to make his final act of witness and service. Indeed, his public ministry now concludes, and the next five chapters are his urgent teachings to his disciples. It is almost like he has now to cram a great deal of into just a few short days of instruction. If you have a “red letter” Bible that it is now starts to be almost all in red.
The first thing he says is a summary of his spiritual teaching. “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 if for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will by servant be also.”
The way to new life is through death. The example is that of a seed which, if it does not go down into the soil and “die,” simply rots or becomes squirrel or bird food. But if it figuratively dies and is buried and gives itself up to its own destiny, allowing the new life encoded in its very nature to emerge, it becomes a new plant, something outwardly very different from a seed. The new plant eventually matures and bears much fruit, in the form of more new seeds.
Jesus is saying that he, and all people, are like seeds. The difference between him and everyone else is that he knows he is a seed and that he is created to explode into something new and different, but which is in complete continuity with what he now is.
Most people are asleep in the fantasy that what they are now is their only stage of existence. They fear death, or any kind of significant change, as a threat to their identity and life. They have built a complex culture around preserving and expressing their seed-nature, without any awareness that there is more to life or that they have some greater destiny than merely being seeds.
Indeed, the powers that rule society actively repress and prevent any awareness that there is more to life than being a seed. Such awareness would undermine the will of seeds to continue working hard as compliant and productive profit-centers for the elite.
II.
Jesus says that those who are infatuated with this mindless, sleepwalking existence, especially those who benefit most from it’s injustices, inequalities, violence, and exploitation, will lose it. They have committed themselves to maintaining the illusion that our current existence is our only possible life, and when that life is over extinction is their reward. They ignominiously perish like moldy, decayed, expired seeds kept too long in a jar in the basement. They become good for nothing beyond the compost pile.
But those who awaken to an awareness of a true life beyond this pointless and limited seed-existence, and who therefore reject and abandon the structures, values, habits, and allegiances of this world, striving instead to prepare for and open themselves to another wider and better world, these are the ones who gain what Jesus calls eternal life.
Eternal life does not mean living forever in the sense of never dying and retaining this same mortal body for century after century, which is a pretty horrible prospect. Eternal life means living outside the limitations, and consequent fear, of time and death. It means trusting in, following, and believing in Jesus and therefore in a sense embracing time and death, by willingly going to the place of transformation, metamorphosis, deconstruction, and vulnerability, and accepting and nurturing the new life that wants to emerge from within us. Just like a seed goes into the dark soil so it can send roots downward and sprout a shoot upward, dying in order to live, and become the plant it was created to be.
But Jesus’ view that the way to eternal life is through death does not make him the purveyor of a suicide cult. We do not come to church for the Kool-Aid. The point is eternal life, and this is something we can participate in here and now, before our physical death.
Jesus’ way is above all a way of life. He seeks to awaken people to their true nature as spiritual beings, breathed into life by a loving Creator. But in order to rise into this realization, people have to symbolically, spiritually, and metaphorically die to this old, corrupt, false, and destructive way of existing.
A seed in the soil does not literally die; far from it. It comes to life! It springs into action! It cracks open and allows a new kind of life to emerge from it, which is its own life! This only looks like death when seen from the perspective of a seed that knows no other life than that of being a seed. Jesus comes to proclaim to us that we have within us the capacity for a glorious kind of life that is presently, to us in our current condition, unimaginable. But it is who we were made to be.
III.
The managers, owners, and masters of this world, and the egos that control our souls, want us to believe that we only die once, when our physical bodies cease functioning, and that this death is the termination and opposite of life. They want us to believe that death is therefore something to be feared, avoided, provided against, and denied. And they use this fear to control us and force us to work for them. It is the source of anxiety, injustice, violence, and slavery.
Jesus rejects this when he talks about his own troubled soul. He does identify with us in our blindness and even our fear. There is nothing easy about this. He knows he is walking into a terrible ordeal. He talks about the ruler of this world being driven out, and by that he means the power of evil, the devil, who controls human hearts. But he knows that what he is really looking at is crucifixion.
Crucifixion was the most potent weapon of terror that the imperial forces had at their disposal. It inspired fear and horror in people on many levels. Obviously, there was the excruciating pain — in fact, crucifixion is where we get the word “excruciating” from. Then there is the public humiliation and exposure, the profound powerlessness and vulnerability, and finally the annihilation of being marginalized and forgotten as a person, and only remembered if at all as a loser, a victim, an example, an object lesson in what happens to people who cross Rome.
For Jesus’ mission to succeed, he has to neutralize the one thing that has led humanity repeatedly over to the dark side, which is fear. And the supreme symbol and instrument of fear in Jesus’ day was crucifixion. He has to show that even crucifixion is utterly powerless. Indeed, he has to show that it becomes the opposite of what it was invented for. Instead of fear and death, it becomes an instrument of life and love.
This is why he has come into the world in the first place. So he refuses to ask God to “save” him from this hour. Salvation is not an avoidance of death, transformation, or change. Rather, salvation is accomplished or finished precisely through death, transformation, and change.
Jesus desires only that the name of the Father be glorified, which is to say he wants the manifestation and the shining out of the love of the Father. It is love that always banishes all fear. Jesus identifies with the love of God, and that gives him the courage to face his hour. This affirmation is confirmed by the voice of God from heaven, which some hear as a rumble of thunder. It is God speaking in nature, in the creation God breathed and spoke into existence at the beginning. Creation in itself inherently glorifies God’s name. Creation itself is an expression, an outpouring of God’s love.
Anything done in love is done in union with God and all creation. Love is eternal life. To give up your life in love is to receive back the life of the creation itself.
IV.
“When I am lifted up,” he says, “I will draw all people to myself.” Like the bronze serpent that Moses made which provided the antidote to snakebite when people looked at it, when Jesus is lifted up on the cross those who see him and perceive what is going on there, that it is the love of God offered for the life of the world, will find the antidote to death. By identifying with him they will break through with him and emerge in the new life of resurrection.
When we see Jesus on the cross, the crucifix, do we see a hapless victim being tortured to death? Do we see the triumph of the darkness, inspiring only fear and slavery? Do we see another victory of mindless cruelty, tightening the screws of our own imprisonment?
Or: do we see the exhaustion of the power of evil and violence, the flood of hatred and fear swallowed up into the infinite love of God and therein neutralized? Do we see a rift, a tear in the fabric of our blindness, the crack in everything, which is how the light gets in, as Leonard Cohen sings?
The crowd listening to Jesus, of course, doesn’t get it. They’re going, “But the Bible says….” “What do you mean by ‘lifted up’ exactly?” “Who is this ‘Son of Man’?” “The Messiah doesn’t die; that’s ridiculous!” And so on.
Jesus just rolls his eyes, shakes his head. He doesn’t respond to any of this. He just says, “The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going. While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light.”
In other words, “I am showing you the way. I am illuminating the path before you. I am telling you the truth. I am revealing, exhibiting, disclosing for you what is real. That is all I can do at this point. Trust me.”
But of course, they don’t. And Jesus is so sick of dumb questions that avoid the issue, change the subject, focus on irrelevant details, and argue about theories, that he finds a place to hide. From now on, Jesus does not talk to the crowds. Now he will only try and clarify his teachings for his disciples, in private, giving them what they need before he dies so they will see what is happening when he dies, and when he returns.
V.
The narrator of the gospel sadly adds a reflection on why the people wouldn’t trust in Jesus. He quotes some passages from the prophet Isaiah about how their eyes were blinded and their hearts were hardened, and they were unable to turn and be healed. Even people who did trust in him kept it to themselves to avoid being ostracized by the institutional leaders. “They loved human glory more than the glory that comes from God,” he says.
Well, there is a lot of that going around, because the glory that comes from God involves dying!
But Jesus says that what we imagine as dying, is really, from another perspective, more like waking up. We die to our own unconsciousness and become aware of what is real. We die to our own blindness and start to see. We die to our own paralysis and start to move. We die to our own slavery and find ourselves free. We die to our own death and come alive!
And as the final act of liberation, Jesus is going to offer himself to be lifted up as the lightning rod upon which the forces that maintain our blindness, paralysis, somnolence, and death blow their whole wad of hate and violence and fear, in one terrible convulsion… only to be drained of their power, while the Lord Jesus emerges from the tomb, with us.
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