25 March 2012

“Jesus, please answer the question”
Lent 5B
John 12:20-33
25 March 2012


Have you noticed that as the days go on, people have a harder time answering questions that are asked of them?
Of course, in this election year, it’s easy for us to point to the politicians as master of this art. I stopped watching the presidential debates a couple of elections ago for precisely this reason. Please, don’t call them debates … they’re really promotion pieces for the candidates’ respective agendas, or media-provided platforms to “stick the fork into” one’s opponent.
But saying “it’s only the politicians who avoid answering the questions” would be unfair. Everyone’s doing it. Accused criminals and their attorneys. Corporate spokespeople. Religious leaders. Joe and / or Jane Average Citizen.
It doesn’t seem to matter … when the hard questions get asked … they don’t get answered. “What do you have to say about these accusations?” “Why is your company asking for a 300% rate increase to its customers?” “Why were you driving so fast?” “Who broke this vase?”
Do you expect a straight answer?
Well, you’re not going to get one.
What we get, instead, is spin. Excuses. Smoke screens. Deft avoidance. Ignoring or dismissing the question entirely, either in words or silence. And when we do get an answer, many times, it’s to a question we didn’t even ask.
And so, in this world full of unanswered, avoided, blown off questions, we come to Sunday worship, and anticipate, expect, long for, answers to our deep questions, the longings and sighings of our soul.
We are perhaps encouraged by the opening words of our Gospel reading … words which may well reflect our own state this morning, as we’ve come here:

Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. They came to Philip … and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus.

Aaaaaaah. Some people … here, outsiders, Jews but not part of Jesus’ usual entourage … in town for the Passover, and likely hearing of Jesus’ miraculous raising of his friend Lazarus from the dead (told in the verses immediately preceding our selection for today) … likely hearing of this miracle, these Greeks have come to see Jesus … to find out who he is, what he’s about, how their lives might interconnect and intertwine from here on out.
Good question, Greeks. And it’s our question, too … our quest … for many of us, we don’t want spin, excuses, smoke screens or avoidance, ignoring or dismissing our question, or getting answers to unasked questions. We, like those Greeks, simply want to see Jesus.

And so Jesus answered them …

Wait for it … wait for it …

Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. 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 it … now is the judgment of the world … and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

HUH????!!!!!
Hey, those Greeks just wanted to see Jesus. We just want to see Jesus. Those Greeks asked the question, to see him, as we do, too. But they didn’t get an answer to their question. Instead they got words about a glorified Son of Man, dead grain bearing fruit, hating your life, and losing it …
Do we have to get this song-and-dance here, too???
JESUS, PLEASE ANSWER THE QUESTION!

Well, now, wait a minute.
There is a line of thought … actually, a well-worn trail of thought … treatises written, commentaries commenting, sermons expositing, on how the words which Jesus gives to Andrew and Philip are really Jesus’ answer to those Greeks’ question, Sir, we wish to see Jesus.
Meaning that, if these Greeks want to see Jesus, then, they need to hear and obey everything Jesus says here … lose your life … hate your life … serve Jesus … follow Jesus … if, when, they would do these things, they, too, would glorify Jesus, be grain falling to the earth and dying, becoming more fruit, fruit of Jesus, fruit for Jesus, for his sake, for the sake of the Word of God and the sake of the world.
As I said, that’s the well-worn sermonic path for these verses, if you wish to see Jesus, then live like Jesus. Or at least, look for those who live their lives as Jesus says to live, and then you’ll see Jesus through their lives.
I know it’s the well worn path because I’ve preached that kind of a sermon before.
Now, it’s not a terrible way to go with this text.
It certainly points toward the cross, the cross-shaped denying-yourself-and-living-for-others way of life of which Jesus speaks here.
It’s just that … it’s an incomplete way to deal with this text.
For starters, it raises more questions than it answers.
How am I supposed to be like that grain of wheat?
How can I hate my life in this world? What about my friends, my family, the community that surrounds me?
It also ignores those Greeks.
Remember them? They’re still back there, waiting, waiting for Philip to return, and give them an answer. And one is not coming back to them, not in these verses nor in the ones which follow.
No, I think the real message of this text lies off the well-worn path. I’m not sorry that I’ve preached sermons like that before … they probably have their place, somehow, somewhere, perhaps better explored in a teaching context than preaching … I am sorry that I ducked the questions, didn’t give space for the questions, tried to close the questions too soon with another answer … yours, mine, and those Greeks.
Think about it. The context of this Gospel text is that Jesus has just raised Lazarus from the dead. Something no one had ever done before, at least, not since the early days of Israel, when one or two of the prophets did. People were starting to talk, people were telling other stories of other miracles Jesus had done … healings … casting out demons … people like these Greeks, Jews from another part of the world, were in town and they wanted to see the One who – they heard – had done all these things.
Jesus, for his part, was in Jerusalem like all the other good observant Jews, for the Passover festival.

Sir, we wish to see Jesus.

Philip receives the Greeks’ question, and leaves. The Greeks wait. Meanwhile, Jesus gives his answer to Philip and Andrew, words that point toward the Cross, the time, the place, to which he’s inexorably headed … but he’s not there yet.
And that’s precisely the point.
Hearing Jesus’ answer to Philip and Andrew would not have made any sense to those Greeks BEFORE Jesus actually lived these words out.
Grain of wheat falling to earth and dying? Losing your life, hating your life?
It made no sense to those in the time before the disciples, before the world actually saw what these words mean, in the Passion of Jesus. Jesus is going there, the Passion story in John’s Gospel starts in the very next chapter with the Last Supper scene … but he … they … and we… are not there yet.
In other words, what Jesus is doing here, by not answering the Greeks … is allowing them time, to rest for a while in their question.
There will be answers enough, lived out in Jesus’ arrest and trial, his beating, his being nailed to the cross, his dying upon it … Jesus’ three days in the grave, and his rising again. There will be answers enough. Answers enough … as the truth of Jesus’ final statement in this text, does, will come to pass, most certainly, for the immediate history of these words as well as all human history since them:

And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.

This “drawing” of which Jesus speaks is just as inexorable, just as bound to happen as is his path there … to his Passion, his suffering, his dying. The draw, the pull, of all people to Jesus through the event of the Cross is historic … magnetic … as I’ve heard another preacher put it, like a tractor pulling a trailer, or even, the Starship Enterprise pulling another ship to it with its ‘tractor beam.’
Inexorable because … everyone suffers, everyone has a moment of crisis, everyone dies … and in those moments, because of the Cross, Jesus is there, with and for us.
But in the meantime, don’t forget those Greeks. There they are, back there, sitting and waiting. They’ve asked their question … their question which is also our question …

We wish to see Jesus …

And so the Word for us this morning is … abide in the question. Rest in the question. Sit back, have a cup, light a candle, open your Scriptures, breathe, pray, cry, meditate.
Abide in the gift of time that comes while you’re waiting for the answer.
Now, I know that’s probably not the answer you wanted to hear. We are impatient people … we want things done yesterday and questions answered before they’re even asked. In some respects, that’s good, because much industriousness has come about for us because of our impatience.
But what is lost?
Time for pondering, meditating, in peace, in quiet, in prayer and thoughtful reflection. Time with God and our thoughts and prayers.
And you know we just don’t take it. We fill our empty spaces with noise, visual noise, audio noise, electronic gadgets, texting and tweeting every particularlity about our lives because if we didn’t … well, why, we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves.
Exactly.
Many, many endeavors and exercises … in completely missing the point.
That’s why we need Lent. Because what “keeping a good Lent” asks of us, is resting, retreating, re-newing in that space between … the space between when the Greeks ask Philip the question … when we ask our question … we wish to see Jesus … and the time when, after Jesus has died and been raised … when they … and we … and the world … we all get the answer to our question.
Loud. Clear. Without spin, excuses, smoke screens, deft avoidance, ignoring or dismissing the question entirely, either in words or silence; or, as an answer to a question we didn’t even ask.
In our suffering, in our pain, in “losing our lives,” yes, even in our dying, Jesus was, is, and will be there with us and for us.

And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.

He will. He does.
Which gives us the time, the space, the freedom … to wait … with those Greeks … and wonder … and ponder … to cry … to cry out … to ask … to simply, be …
… to be with Jesus.
To be with Jesus in our questions.
Even as he is with us, in them.
With us … in Lent, in Easter, in death, in life, in all the questions and the spaces and the places between …
Amen.