Fifth Sunday of Lent
Year B March 21 2021
Jeremiah 31:31-34
The days are coming, says the Lord,
when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel
and the house of Judah.
It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers
the day I took them by the hand
to lead them forth from the land of Egypt;
for they broke my covenant,
and I had to show myself their master, says the Lord.
But this is the covenant that I will make
with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord.
I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts;
I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
No longer will they have need to teach their friends and relatives
how to know the Lord.
All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says the Lord,
for I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sin no more.
Psalm 51
R. (12a) Create a clean heart in me, O God.
Have mercy on me, O God, in your goodness;
in the greatness of your compassion wipe out my offense.
Thoroughly wash me from my guilt
and of my sin cleanse me.
R. Create a clean heart in me, O God.
A clean heart create for me, O God,
and a steadfast spirit renew within me.
Cast me not out from your presence,
and your Holy Spirit take not from me.
R. Create a clean heart in me, O God.
Give me back the joy of your salvation,
and a willing spirit sustain in me.
I will teach transgressors your ways,
and sinners shall return to you.
R. Create a clean heart in me, O God.
Hebrews 5:7-9
In the days when Christ Jesus was in the flesh,
he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears
to the one who was able to save him from death,
and he was heard because of his reverence.
Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered;
and when he was made perfect,
he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.
John 12:20-33
Some Greeks who had come to worship at the Passover Feast
came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee,
and asked him, “Sir, we would like 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.
Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies,
it remains just a grain of wheat;
but if it dies, it produces much fruit.
Whoever loves his life loses it,
and whoever hates his life in this world
will preserve it for eternal life.
Whoever serves me must follow me,
and where I am, there also will my servant be.
The Father will honor whoever serves me.
“I am troubled now. Yet what should I say?
‘Father, save me from this hour’?
But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour.
Father, glorify your name.”
Then a voice came from heaven,
“I have glorified it and will glorify it again.”
The crowd there heard it and said it was thunder;
but others said, “An angel has spoken to him.”
Jesus answered and said,
“This voice did not come for my sake but for yours.
Now is the time of judgment on this world;
now the ruler of this world will be driven out.
And when I am lifted up from the earth,
I will draw everyone to myself.”
He said this indicating the kind of death he would die.
Introduction
Five weeks ago we were looking into Jeshua's experience in the desert. Luke ends his version of the story with words that send a chill down the spine. "And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time." Now we have come to the time of the devil's opportunity. Jeshua and the disciples have come to Jerusalem for the great festival of Passover. He was welcomed with extraordinary enthusiasm by crowds of people. The raising of Lazarus had become a talking point. People were going out to Bethany to see the man, but it was rumoured that the authorities were determined to put a stop to the madness.
The threatening clouds darkened Jeshua's mood. He found himself adding up what he had achieved and what might yet be required of him. He was tired and dispirited, exactly the opportunity for the devil's return.
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Some Reflections
Introducing us to John's reflections and providing a point of entry is the first reading for the day, the Jeremiah Proclamation of a new Covenant. Actually it is not a 'new' covenant in the sense that the old is abrogated. It is a new step for us to take in responding to the Covenant recorded in the stories of our father Abraham and of our liberator Moses. As we get older and wiser over the centuries we become aware of deeper levels than those we've been living on up to now. Going deeper feels 'new' every day.
"I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts." It sounds like a good idea, worth a try, after the exasperating failure of the Law that was sealed in the blood of animals to symbolise the life-commitment of the person offering the sacrifice. That crude ritual failed to achieve its purpose and instead of leading a man to total giving of himself it became a substitute or an after-the-event payment of a penalty. Even the death of Jeshua himself is still interpreted this way.
What, then, is this 'new' that Jeremiah proclaims? What would a law planted in the heart be like, as opposed to a law of proscriptions and penalties and engraved in stone? As we so often say today, it is a 'law of love'. And what does this mean? Is a 'law of love' really just a smart way of dressing up the idea of law? No, because 'love knows not law.'
Law is obligation to do, to perform, to avoid, to obey, coupled with penalties for failure to observe.
Love is willingness, voluntary, wanting what you want because it is for your good - and it involves not compliance but total, ready, happy, willing gifting of myself in the doing of it.
Love and law are like oil and water. They won't blend. Love will float on top, because law is heavier and sinks. If love is volatile enough, even while it is floating on water, will burn and give light and heat which law, like water, never will.
Love is volunteering. "Why would you volunteer for that?" "Because it is good and I want to do it!" That's the quality God would see in people, the new standard in the kingdom of God. To live out our relationships with one another - and with the Divine - happily, willingly, and always on the lookout for the opportunity to give a little more. The Jeremiah Proclamation says that this is possible for every one of us because God has planted his 'law of love' in our hearts. Hence no one can say, It's out of my reach.
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With this in mind, try to read the passage from John's gospel, allowing its message to seep in at its own pace.
The episode begins with some Greeks asking to see Jeshua. This should be quite unremarkable, yet the setting of the whole episode is against the backdrop of this request from some Gentiles who had come to Jerusalem for the festival.
They approached Philip, perhaps just because of his name but perhaps because they thought he would be Greek. I wonder was he in fact a Greek convert to Judaism. He is featured especially in John's gospel and shows initiatives that would seem to come from a critical mindset. He asked the question, how were they expected to feed thousands of people with their few loaves of bread? At the Last Supper he said to Jeshua: 'Show us the Father and that is enough for us!' Somehow this is not the sort of thing I'd expect a born Jew to ask.
Evidently these Gentiles were not rejected out of hand as the Syrophoenician woman was. Their request became an occasion for Jeshua to reveal confusion and fear troubling him. Abruptly, as John tells it, he spoke of what he saw lay ahead for him: 'Now is the hour for the son of man to be glorified.' John uses 'glorify' in a sense all his own, loading it with all the meaning in the life of the Messiah, in particular the 'glory' of the ultimate gift of his life in the vicious torture of the cross. Jeshua explains that achieving his 'glory' would entail his dying, like the grain of wheat that gives its life in producing a new growing plant.
Is there a connection here? Why did John insert this small item in his reflections at this point? What led Jeshua to speak of his glorification on the occasion of being approached by some Greeks? Why was he so upset? Could we say, for the Gentile to enter the kingdom of God the Jew had to die? Does the death of Jeshua represent the death of the old so that the new may be born? Did he think of it this way?
Jeshua is under extreme stress. The sense of an impending terrible fate in the not too distant future looms darkly, dampening his enthusiastic encounters with hungry, confused, needy people looking for comfort. The Greeks want to meet him. The whole world wants - needs - to meet him because he knows with such certainty that the path he points out is the right one for healing. He holds the key; he is the key. And yet being Jewish he cannot just welcome these foreign people with their sharp reason and their degenerate ways of worship. He has to tell Andrew to explain this to them and send them away.
He sinks into depression. Caught between the firm rock of his Father's will – that he fulfil his mission – and the hard place of conflicting demands on all sides, he burst out: “Now I am worried!”
“Yet what should I say?
‘Father, save me from this hour’?
But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour.
Father, glorify your name.”
The usual way of reading this is to see Jeshua giving priority to the Father's interests above his own, as in: "I am willing to bear any trials; I will not shrink from any sufferings. Let thy name be honored... whatever sufferings it may cost me." (Barnes' Notes on the Bible.)
But I wonder if we dared come closer to Jeshua would we feel something more than a worry; something bordering on despair? “What can I say?” Is there bitterness in his voice? Frustrated at every turn, by tradition, by dim-witted disciples, by brazen scholars used to unquestioning obedience from their underlings, and now by the law that would not allow him to welcome some people just because they are foreigners. And no end in sight but an ugly one. If he is going to do any good he needs to get in to speak to the priests. He must get a message through to the High Priest.
His mind went back to those first heady weeks around Caphernaum, when crowds hung on his every word. 'Blessed are those who mourn...' Is this what it meant - struggling with a depression fueled by failure and facing more trouble ahead? 'Blessed are those who suffer persecution for justice' sake: theirs is the kingdom!' Did he really say that? It's one thing to talk about metanoia, to call for change in the way we look at things, but what about the way you feel when your back's to the wall?
Close to giving up, he pours out his bitter feelings of defeat to the Father he has never seen: "Father, glorify your name!" 'Just do it yourself! I'm sick and tired of it. I've tried everything and I get nowhere. The few people who listen to what I've got to say don't have power to change anything. The local rabbis and pharisees only want to prove me wrong. Will I ever get to speak to the priests. Short of getting myself arrested is there any way in to their exclusive courts?'
Some said they heard a threatening rumble of thunder in the sky, others an angel's comforting voice. I wonder which one Jeshua heard? In his heart he heard the age-old response we get every time we challenge God: "I have in the past, and I will again!" It's that rock-solid rightness of God. Whatever the confusion and conflict, the Ground of Being is what it is. The Truth is the truth.
Slowly, reluctantly, he dares to look into the future. For the Greeks and all the nations to come to him, Jewish exclusiveness has to die. What he identifies with most deeply, what he treasures more than anything else in the world, what he has spent years of exhausting dangerous effort to clean up and make viable - it has to die. That will kill him - the death of Israel, for he lives the core of its beautiful grandness in the way he feels about YHWH - like a treasured son.
It will kill him. I really will. This is all going to end badly. If he keeps to this path, if he allows these Greeks to come and have a chat, if he continues to stand for the right and the true, he'll be arrested, and then what?
And again the real prospect ahead reveals itself: "If I am lifted up...!" Roman-style execution for the entertainment of the troops and for the terrorising of the subject population. The death of this one Jew at the demand of the Jewish hierarchy would be the end of Jewish primacy and privilege. It would be the ultimate refusal to say Yes to the Father, the final cruel madness that will spell death to the old, and clear the ground for the new to spring up. "If I am lifted up I will draw everyone into the kingdom of the Father."
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Finish now. Don't waste time going back through my thoughts trying to work out how the essay hangs together. Perhaps it doesn't! Now is the time to go back to the readings, the Jeremiah Proclamation and John's account of what troubled Jeshua's heart when some Greeks wanted to meet him. Stay with these enigmatic words, wondering what the writers were trying to communicate as they wrote, allowing their thoughts to explain themselves to you in the silence of your listening...