In junior high, I entered a pious stage--praying for God to make me a better person and to love others and not hate my brother for getting a part in the school musical that I had wanted. Part of that pious stage was trying to read my Bible all the way through. A girl in my Sunday-school class had commented that some people say they're Christians but they haven't even read the Bible through. So, I was trying to be a real Christian and read my Bible all the way through. But the "begats" in the Old Testament got too tedious for me; so I decided to skip to the New Testament.
One night I ran across one of those passages where the Son of man comes like a thief in the night and two people will be standing side by side and one will be taken and one will be left. I was terrified. I wandered around the house, white as a sheet, until my parents asked if I was feeling okay.
They explained about symbolic language and how the people in Bible times had these picturesque ways of talking about what they believed but that God loved us and that was what mattered. It helped a little bit--but I still had a hard time falling asleep that night.
Then I went to college. There I learned about apocalyptic literature and the historical context and how all the passages in the book of Revelation were really about the conflict between Christians and their Roman oppressors and how these were really radical political statements. I learned about ancient near eastern myths and everything was fine. And I stopped worrying that Jesus might come and the world would end suddenly and I wouldn't be right with God.
No. I don't worry about that any more.
What terrifies me now, is that Christ may come back like a thief in the night--and I may not even realize it. I worry that Jesus may climb on the bus in front of me one day--and I'll get off the bus and go to work and never realize how close he was. What if I see him sitting down and partying with right-wingers and dismiss him as a Reagan Republican? What if Christ comes back and because of some weird preachings and strange spiritual ideas, I end up paying as little attention to Jesus as I do to Shirley MacLaine. Or maybe I'll pass Christ on the corner with a bullhorn handing out tracts and dismiss her as a kook.
The passage that Anita just read from the Gospel of John revolves around the whole question of whether or not people see Jesus. It suggests that judgment consists in not recognizing the Word made flesh when it is right in our midst. This passage begins with some Greeks asking to see Jesus. In fact, the whole Gospel of John is consumed with the issue of recognizing Jesus.
In the first chapter of John, we're told about the Word becoming flesh. John tells us that the people who should have recognized Jesus didn't. "He came unto his own and his own received him not." Then a little while later, Jesus heals a blind person and the whole controversy that ensues has to do with who really sees and who doesn't see. The blind person recognizes the significance of Jesus' actions while all the good religious people who think that they understand everything don't see Jesus for who he is at all.
I'm terrified by the whole problem of seeing Jesus, because the Gospel of John makes clear that very few people do see. Even those who do never realize fully who Jesus is or what he is about. Not the peace and justice activists. Not the people at the grass roots--they make the mistake of trying to make Jesus a king. Certainly not the religious people. They have a particularly hard time seeing him. That worries me because I can get pretty religious.
The more I read my Bible, the less I know for sure about him. Yet, this passage makes absolutely clear that judgment revolves around whether or not we see Jesus. Notice how Jesus proclaims, "Now is the judgment of this world" immediately after the crowd fails to recognize the divine voice from heaven that proclaims the hour of glorification?
Now is the hour of judgment. Not some day later when Christ comes a second time. Not at my death. Not later. Now. Right now.
According to John's Gospel, the reason we have such a hard time recognizing Jesus is because seeing Jesus is inextricably bound up with suffering. The last thing we want is a Christ who leads us into suffering. We want a Christ who rescues us from it.
We're not so different from the people in Jesus' day. The gospel passage comes hard on the heels of the story of the triumphal entry--when the people proclaimed Jesus the ruler of Israel. A ruler who would end their oppression at the hands of the Romans. A ruler who would bring in God's rule and make Jerusalem the center of the world.
At first it almost seems that Jesus agrees with the people. When the Greeks come asking to see Jesus, Jesus proclaims that the hour has come for his glorification.
But we need read only a bit further to find out what it means to be glorified. Jesus' very next words are "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit."
Listen! Listen to these words: "Those who love their lives lose them, and those who hate their lives in this world will keep them for eternal life. If any people serve me, they must follow me.
Here Jesus speaks about people following him. Where is he going? He is going to the cross.
He continues by saying, "and where I am, there shall my servant be also." Where is Jesus about to be? On the cross. Jesus says, "Where I am--that is on the cross--there shall my servant be also."
Suffering is something that our society avoids at all costs. That becomes expressly clear when we look at our society's economic predicament. We have gone deep into debt as a nation--to satisfy our addiction to military security and to creature comforts. And our political leaders still promise us that the problem can be solved with just a little belt tightening.
Some do proclaim the coming economic collapse--as a fear tactic to make money. Their advertisements say that all we have to do is buy their book and follow its advice and we'll be able to live comfortably through the crisis while all those around us go under. Yes, the crisis is coming, they promise, and we'll show you how to escape its devastation.
But Jesus brings a different message "Now is the judgment of this world." Not in the future. Now. The judgment consists in our inability to see the movement of God in the world all around us.
And in our day and age, the movement of God in our society, is a movement of judgment. We don't have to look far to realize that judgment has come upon this society already. It's not coming. It's here.
In the initial stages, the consequences of our society's greed and indulgence, the consequences of our sins are being visited on the economic classes below us: the unemployed and the street people, the poor elderly and impoverished children. Jesus is suffering all around us already, but we pretend that judgment has not yet come because it hasn't hit us hard yet.
For a long time, we--us peace-and-justice-oriented Christians--have been proclaiming the message that this society better work for peace and do justice because God's judgment will come upon us if we don't. That was a legitimate message. But the time for that message is past. The hour of judgment has come, and we face a new, two-fold task. We must learn ourselves and teach others how to recognize the presence of Christ in the midst of God's judgment.
Our new task is to learn how to suffer--perhaps even how to die--in a redemptive way. We live in a society that wants desperately to push the burden onto others. We see that already. In economic hard times racism, sexism, anticommunism, heterosexism all prosper as people desperately look for scapegoats for society's ills.
If the church is to have any redemptive presence in the world, today, it must begin to model ways of accepting and sharing the pain, of solidarity in suffering, so that people know that it is not necessary to turn against each other as we currently do.
Our society is desperately insecure. This past week, Florida executed a likely innocent man--I'm convinced out of fear that to pardon him would somehow be seen as weakness. This past week, my President engineered a border crisis between Nicaragua and Honduras--I'm convinced because he is terrified of having a little nation that doesn't simply say "yes sir" to our nation any more.
We who are middle-class Christians must struggle to learn how to accept weakness and powerlessness and do that publicly; so that middle-class society around us will not be afraid to accept the chastisement of God which bears down upon us. We must teach those around us how to become powerless without fear. And we cannot do that until we have learned to do it ourselves.
In her book, Peace Be with You, Cornelia Lehn tells a story about Jane Addams, whose ministry at Hull House brought counsel, education, and resources to poor immigrants in Chicago. Lehn tells how Addams woke in the night to find an intruder in her room. Worried that the man might wake her nephew, who lived with her, she warned the man to keep quiet. When the stranger attempted to flee through a window, she instructed him to go out the hall and stairway lest he hurt himself.
Jane Addams's defenselessness was her only defense. When her life seemed threatened and her home violated, she had thoughts only for the safety of someone most would count as an enemy.
Let me venture to say that this need to learn how to be defenseless, how to accept powerlessness--and perhaps even suffering has implications for us at Germantown Mennonite Church as we talk about how to organize our congregation. The models we adopt--whether they have to do with dividing the congregation or renovating or building or whatever--will have significant consequences for how much energy we are able to put into the social tasks at hand. We need to adopt models of being church that build solidarity with each other and with the society around us. We need to be asking ourselves if the models we look at will empower us to face with clarity and vision the time of judgment that has come.
We're going to be sorely tempted to adopt models that comfort us and isolate us from pain. We will want to come to church for spiritual escape rather than for empowerment to engage in the struggle around us. We will want to avoid pain and suffering.
But that is precisely what Jesus refused to do. Even though he was innocent, he refused to avoid suffering. But if the hour of glorification is the hour of suffering; so also is the hour of suffering the hour of glorification--it is the hour in which God's activity in the world is most transparent. The Gospel of John proclaims that in Jesus' suffering salvation is accomplished for all people.
Through Jesus' suffering, the ruler of this world is cast out--evil is overthrown. At the close of this morning's Gospel passage, Jesus says, "and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to me."
He shares our suffering--both our innocent and our guilty suffering. Through it, he expresses God's solidarity with all people--even with those of us who have a hard time seeing Jesus or recognizing his presence.
But now the dilemma shifts. For no longer is the problem that we can't see Jesus, but that we see him all too clearly. He is offering us the cross. Jesus doesn't promise us that we will escape tribulation.
But he does implicitly promise that hope rides hard on the heels of tribulation. The harsh irony is that when we desperately seek to avoid suffering--to save our lives--we lose them. And the gentle irony is that when we learn how to suffer--to lose our lives--that is when we gain them.
That we gain our lives by losing them is a hard saying, a sobering truth. But it is one we can live by, if necessary die by, and certainly by which we inherit salvation.