Peas in a Pod
John
12:20-33
By
Reverend
Litton Logan
April
2, 2006
Scriptures:
John
12:20--33 (NRSV)
20Now
among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. 21They
came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we
wish to see Jesus.” 22Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and
Philip went and told Jesus. 23Jesus answered them, “The
hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. 24Very
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. 25Those
who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will
keep it for eternal life. 26Whoever
serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever
serves me, the Father will honor.
Jesus
Speaks about His Death
27“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. 28Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I
will glorify it again.” 29The crowd standing there heard it and
said that it was thunder. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” 30Jesus
answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not for
mine. 31Now is the judgment of this
world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. 32And
I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”
33He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.
Sermon:
It is so easy to jump into a passage of scripture and work one’s self
out using one’s own needs and opinions or time honor clichés as the source of
interpretation. It is so much
easier to start with the sins of the world and others and make scriptures say
what we want them to say-- “Thus says God, thus said Jesus, thus says John in
the Bible because that’s what I want to hear and believe”.
.
When we do such things opinion often masquerades as exegesis and this is
very dangerous stuff, which defrauds scripture and cheats us of the life giving
truth of Scripture.
It
is best to become immersed in the author’s mind and context when we interpret
scripture.
As I indicated last Sunday, the writer of John’s Gospel is dealing with
an intra-Jewish struggle for religious authority.
After the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed in 70 C.E. only one group of
Jewish leadership survived in sufficient numbers to rally Jewish thinking and
practices. This group was the
Pharisees. These survivors
retreated to a place Southwest of Jerusalem called Jamnia and began to sort and
hammer out a clear and definitive way to be Jewish in light the destruction of
the Temple.
They set the cannon of Jewish scriptures, the standards and rules for
rabbinic ordination, and the guide lines for purging dangerous fringe groups and
heretical movements from the synagogues.
We see the same dynamics within Christianity during the
Catholic/Protestant struggles in the Reformation.
Let me illustrate the dimensions of this ferreting out and purging that
was going on in the synagogues by sharing with you a Jewish Benediction found in
Cairo Gneizah in 1896 that most likely reflects the Orthodox Jewish sentiment
that John was dealing with:
"For
the apostates let there be no hope and let the arrogant government be speedily
uprooted in our days. Let the
Nazarenes [Christians] and the Minim [heretics] be destroyed in a moment and let
them be blotted out of the Book of Life and not be inscribed together with the
righteous. Blessed art thou, O
Lord, who humblest the proud!" (The
New Interpreter’s Bible, Excursion into John 9:22)
Therefore, when one reads the word “Jew” in John’s Gospel we would
be wise to check and see if John is talking about the leading rabbis and
scholars and their work at Jamnia or just the average Jewish person setting in
the synagogue.
We
should also apply this same scrutiny to the use of the words Greeks and
Gentiles.
One view is that the Greeks, who come to speak with Jesus in our
scriptures today, are most likely Hellenistic Jews, like the Apostle Paul. These Hellenistic Jews would have adopted the Greek language
and customs and were themselves personae non-gratis among many of the rabbis and
scholars at Jamnia. I hasten to
point out also, that during Jesus’ ministry, we have no record of Gentiles
converts. However, by the time John
writes, Christianity has all but become Greek Christianity. Therefore, the Greeks that came to Jesus that day could have
been Greek pagan converts or Hellenistic Jewish converts.
Regardless of which group of Greeks they were, they most likely wanted to
see Jesus to become his disciples.
As John interprets and experiences Jesus in his writings, he sees that
Jesus anticipated the Gospel becoming universal.
For John, the Gospel—the Good News of God—is no longer restricted to
the Jews, or to the “officials” of Judaism.
God’s saving work is available to the world and “whosoever”
believes in God’s only begotten son.
I am sure many of you in school, Sunday School, or Daily Vacation Bible
School have planted seeds in little paper or clear plastic cups.
The object lesson was to watch the miracle of growth—a dry seed or
bean, when watered in warm soil came to life and grew up to produce hundreds of
beans or seeds. A Christian object
lesson was to understand that as a matter of our faith in God, we like Jesus,
have to die to our human ways of doing and understanding things and embrace
Jesus’ teachings and ways of life to enjoy the gift of God’s salvation.
This is a good object lesson and relevant to our scriptures today.
As these Greeks come to Jesus, they represent people who were outside the
mainstream of Judaism and signal the Gospel stepping out of the bounds of
Judaism—Pharisaical or Hellenistic—and entering the larger world of
humanity. Interestingly, we don’t
learn if Jesus ever sees these Greeks or not.
Upon hearing that the Greeks want to see him, Jesus launches into a
discourse on the necessity of his upcoming death and eventual glorification.
We may speculate that he does this as a way of making clear the costs of
obedience to God for himself and for all who would be his disciples.
Following Jesus is more than just admiring him; living by his teachings,
and hanging out with like-minded people. A
disciple of Jesus must adopt an ultimate life priority of unselfish love for
others.
A disciple of Jesus must “hate” their life.
A better rendering of the word “hate” than “self-detest” would be
“choosing something other than one’s own self as a top priority of one’s
life.” Therefore, living out the
Gospel of Christ is to be paramount in one’s life even at the expense of
crucifying one’s self-centeredness or the possibility of persecution and death
for one’s faith.
In our scriptures to day, Jesus’ willingness to lay down his life for
the higher claims of God in his life is validated by the voice of God.
In effect, God is glorified in such self-expenditure and self-sacrifice
and in turn, God glorifies Jesus and those disciples who do likewise.
It is Jesus’ willingness to lay down his life out of love for others
that becomes the divine standard by which God judges the entire world.
If the disciples are not willing to do as Jesus does—lay down their
life for God’s claim on their lives--then they in effect judge themselves
unworthy of the glorification of the Christ and the right to be called
disciples.
This
willingness to lay down one’s life in love of God is the power that will
exorcise all the forces—natural or supernatural—that stand in opposition to
God’s rule and reign earth.
John understands that as Jesus is lifted up on the cross in an act of
total obedience to God and love for his friends it will show all people of the
world, who desire a true relationship with their Creator and Sustainer the ways
of truth and life.
The
believer must accept in faith that God’s love on the cross is the source of
their salvation and live in that freedom never to pick up the false claims of
salvation offered by the world. Living
a moral, pious, and devote life are ways of honoring God but such things do not
save the individual—salvation is the Gift of God’s love on the cross for the
believer.
In John’s day, one may have to endure the horrors of persecution and
the shame of rejection and ostracization for one’s faith but in the end, it
will be well worth it, so hang it there. The
way of the cross—sacrificial love is now the way of God come to maturity in
the humanity of Jesus—not law, rites, rituals, or ethnic heritage but love.
In short, we cannot have the Christ of God without the Cross; we cannot
be Christians without cross bearing.
Christ
without the Cross
Theologian
H. Richard Neibuhr [one of the leading
theologians of the last century and often the voice of American liberal and
conservative Christianity like the writer of John’s Gospel] condemns
cross-less Christianity whether it is promoted by liberal Protestantism or the
evangelical "feel good", seeker-sensitive churches.
[Richard Neibuhr says]
It is a false gospel in
which "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without
judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross."
There
is no Christianity without the Cross.
Quote
by Richard Neibuhr
There is a point we often miss in Jesus’ analogy of the seed that must
die to bring forth an abundance of produce that I want to point out.
4Very
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.
I have raised many, many gardens in my life time. Tomatoes, butter beans, squash, cucumbers, Crowder peas,
turnip greens, collard greens, okra, and corn--you know--the kind of food
we’ll eat in heaven. However, my
favorite of all garden fresh vegetables are beans and peas.
As I have harvested the benefits of my labors, I must admit each pea,
bean, kernel of corn, etc., looked just like the one I planted. I am sure some plant geneticist could have told the
difference between the bean and pea I planted from the one I harvested, but for
all intent in purpose the one I put in the ground look just like the one I
shelled and ate.
Whoa! Did you catch that? Do
you really catch the importance of that analogy?
Those of Christ, his disciples, the produce of the cross are
indistinguishable from the Christ just as one grain of wheat is from its
progenitor, a pea, or bean from its progenitor.
Talk about a new way of God seeing us.
Talk about a radical way of accessing and judging ourselves and our
relationship to God. True disciples
are just peas in a pod—Jesus and you, Jesus and me, Jesus and all those who
believe in the Only Begotten Son. We
are peas in God’s pod of love.
In
conclusion, Stephen Sizer tells us we are not to be inoffensively neutral in
Christ. That is, we must not take our salvation and squirrel it away
against the day of our death.
Religiously
Neutral
The
world today prefers to be inoffensively neutral.
It does not like having to decide. [Sizer
goes on to cite that] Dorothy
L. Sayers observed, "In the world it is called tolerance, but in hell it is
called despair... the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to
know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds
purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is
nothing for which it will die."
How
different it was for Jesus in John’s Gospel.
He stepped up and prepared himself for the cross.
Jesus was going to do three things simultaneously by his death.
1.
Glorify the Father 12:27 - make God known
2.
Judge the World 12:31 - pay the price for sin
3.
Rescue People 12:32-33 - save those who turn to him
As Christians, we are to step up and prepare ourselves for the cross of
self-denial and possibly persecution and death by:
·
Making God known in word and deed to a despairing and needy world.
·
Telling the world its sin and corruption are judged not by God but
by its own indifference to the neighbor and in its sins against the self and the
neighbor. We in effect judge
ourselves by our choices.