Jesus - knowing what he faces

We have reached Tuesday in Holy Week. Today let’s have a go at seeing what Jesus saw his call being as he approaches death. 

The passage for today is John 12: 20 - 36 

In the church I grew up in, Folly Methodist in Wheathampstead, the pulpit had a small brass plaque in it, reminding those who preached from it  of their task. The plaque read: “Sir, we would see Jesus.” I wonder if someone came to you and asked you to introduce them to Jesus, where you would begin. 

For me, Jesus is God, love incarnate, who gets involved and messy and is never frightened of huge pastoral problems... 

(Sorry I just laughed out loud as predictive text just told me Jesus is never frightened of huge pasties!!!) 

For me, Jesus is the friend and saviour who shows us what compassion is all about. He walks the streets of Galilee and goes about transforming lives one by one: blind men, bleeding women, the ostracised and condemned, seeing potential in would be disciples, bringing healing to situations that feel hopeless. Compassion literally means “suffering with” and here, for me, is what is attractive about Jesus. He is not some sugary sweet, easy answers figure, he stands with us just where we are and works out with us how we can move on. 

This means that he will often challenge bad religion, upset authorities about injustice and be radical where there just has to be a different way. He has the whole world in his hands. The painting above is one I use when I need to describe who Jesus is: Salvador Dali’s Christ of St John of the Cross. It can be seen in Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow. It shows Jesus looking down from the cross on a shoreline and a fisherman, but without his crown of thorns or any nails or any blood. Dalí said he made the decision not to include them following a dream. For me, the painting shows the victory of the cross: that the suffering Christ has all things in control — and his suffering will in the end bring peace to life. 

Jesus in John 12 in the bit of the chapter I’m choosing to reflect on today talks about being glorified. The last part of his being in the world to transform it is about to begin. Life, as we know it, needs to die, there must be service at the heart of life if we are really to follow Jesus. Jesus knows the only way he can end his mission is to die. There is no other way. We will see in the next few days that he will wobble and struggle but he knows what has to be. His soul is troubled. Can he be saved from “this hour”? No. It is why he has come to it. “Father, glorify your name.” 

Today I invite you to think about Jesus, discipleship and if you are part of a church what following Jesus to “this hour” means. Three things to think about today: 

1. Jesus shows us what God is like. He is part of the Godhead and God suffers. And I need a God who suffers. A God who doesn’t know what suffering is doesn’t help me when I need help. 

In his book, This Sunrise of Wonder, Michael Mayne, a former Dean of Westminster, writes this: 

”God does not provide answers to our questions concerning suffering and the existence of evil. What he does (what else could love do?) is to enter into the questions. He enters into the pain, the dirt and the danger, and takes the kind of body that when it is flogged, suffers, and when nails are thrust through it and it is hung up on a roughly-hewn cross, dies. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from his Nazi prison-cell, ‘only a suffering God can help’. 

I point you to a hymn that summarises Charles Wesley’s theology of the passion, there is no better : 

God of unexampled grace,
Redeemer of mankind,
Matter of eternal praise
We in thy passion find;
Still our choicest strains we bring,
Still the joyful theme pursue,
Thee the friend of sinners sing,
Whose love is ever new.

Endless scenes of wonder rise
From that mysterious tree,
Crucified before our eyes,
Where we our Maker see;
Jesus, Lord, what hast thou done?
Publish we the death divine,
Stop, and gaze, and fall, and own
Was never love like thine!

Never love nor sorrow was
Like that my Saviour showed:
See him stretched on yonder cross,
And crushed beneath our load!
Now discern the Deity,
Now his heavenly birth declare;
Faith cries out: 'Tis He, 'tis He,
My God, that suffers there!

2. If Jesus invites us to follow him in his glory, then it will lead to us being his people like him. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, quoted by Michael Mayne above, perhaps gave us the most powerful and challenging summons to really being Christians. Everyone should read “The Cost of Discipleship” in Holy Week. 

”The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. It is that dying of the old man which is the result of his encounter with Christ. As we embark upon discipleship we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with his death—we give over our lives to death. Thus it begins; the cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise god-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.“

Is our discipleship cross shaped? Does our Christianity cost us? Do we follow “to this hour”? 

3. If Jesus sees mission culminating in sacrifice and death to bring glory then that will seriously affect what we do in our churches. I wonder what we spend our energy on in church life? Keeping an institution going! But if we spent our energy on being compassionate and suffering with people, then we would be church so much better and the thing we worry about keeping going would grow because we’d have so much more joy and purpose wouldn’t we? I know, it’s a mad idea. But I’m a bit of a mad minister, be warned next Circuit!! 

That’s why Methodist Church Council agendas have the item “Conversation on the Work of God” at the beginning. We often ignore that as we need to spend time discussing our shortfall so we can’t pay the assessment and the boiler going wrong and who we are going to invite for Harvest and where we are going for our Christmas dinner. 

My favourite meeting in my last appointment was a guild AGM which every year took ages analysing last year’s turkey before deciding where to go for their dinner next Christmas! If all our meeting asked “how are we following Jesus’ call, well, who knows what might happen! 

The reflection today is a bit more serious than normal but I’ve found writing it really helpful as I remind myself what my call is as I prepare to return to full time ministry later in the year. A minister tonight has said to me that the pastoral load after this virus has passed will be huge. 

The thing has rocked us, today we are shocked that the Prime Minister is in intensive care. Our prayers are with him and his fiancée and their unborn child and with all those who are suffering and frightened. We will need to be at “this hour”, we will need to serve, we will need some things we did before church buildings closed, to die, we will need to be crucified to really show people like those Greeks in this passage and those who still say “we would see Jesus” who he really is through who we are. 

I’m using some of my favourite passiontide readings today. I find this quote from George Macleod of the Iona Community a constant challenge but also a focus where we need to be. 

“The cross must be raised again at the centre of the marketplace as well as on the steeple of the church. I am claiming that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town garbage heap, at a crossroads so cosmopolitan they had to write His title in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. At the kind of place where cynics talk smut, and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble, because that is where He died and that is what he died about and that is where churchmen ought to be and what churchmen should be about.”

Hear part of today’s reading again:

Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honour the one who serves me.

“Now my soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour.Father, glorify your name!”

Sorry - it’s 1.36am. I just started writing! At least you have Tuesday’s thoughts early! :)