This was also posted at The Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on March 22, 2015.
The death of the Church has been proclaimed over and over. I’m sure
we’ve all heard the bad news: the Church is dying—or, at least
our church
is dying. Young people see no need for church, especially millennials,
the newspapers crow. More people identify as atheist than at any other
time, we are warned. In a book of Lenten meditations entitled
God is on the Cross,
the great German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer talked about
“the dying Church” as well. Many Christians in Germany during World War
II doubtless feared that the Church was dying then as dictators tried
to either kill it or co-opt it, and as madness reigned across continents
that groaned under the feet of armies marching under the banners of
death. Looking upon this crisis, Bonhoeffer made this observation:
Believers “do not believe in people or in the good in people that
ultimately must triumph; they also do not believe in the church in its
human power. Rather, believers believe solely in God, who creates and
does the impossible, who creates life out of death, who has called the
dying church to life against and in spite of us and through us.”
Bonhoeffer imagines the church “under the cross.” So too our gospel
reading for today turns our faces toward the cross and dares to
reimagine what it means, just as we are being called to reimagine the
Church and what it means in this time and place. The gospel reading for
today, which explores the paradox of how death can bring life, is the
hinge upon which the good news of the gospel of John is proclaimed. This
is the point at which, as Jesus says, “the hour has come for the Son of
Man to be glorified.” What caused this hour to finally come at this
particular point? The world—in the form of some “Greeks,” which means
us—has come to Jesus. And soon, soon, Jesus is going to be
exalted—lifted up—on the cross and beyond the cross, held up to bring
all of the world to God. What is considered by the world to be a sign of
shame is instead going to be the means of exaltation.
In the gospel of John, this is the point where Jesus moves from his
ministry toward his exaltation—and when we come to Jesus. Victory can
push through to us at the darkest of times. For John, the crucifixion
brings victory, because the cross brings the world to God. We don’t
usually think of it this way, but the metaphor of the grain of wheat
helps us remember this too. Jesus speaks again in paradox. In order to
live we must die to all that separates us from the love of God. Those
who die to themselves will finally have a full life.
How do we (and John) understand the paradox that the cross is a
symbol of victory and power rather than dishonor and disgrace? A death
which is a sign of torture is instead a triumph. This was a scandalous
idea at the time it was formulated, as it also is for us. Crucifixion
was the means of execution for rebels and for murderers, and it was a
terrible, lingering way to die.
But by casting back to the events of the history of Israel, John sees
that the saving power of the cross has already been hinted at. Last
week we heard the story of the people of Israel being saved by looking
upon a symbol of a serpent (or seraph, depending on how you translate
the original Hebrew) raised up on a pole, and looking upon that sign
saved them from death. The reading from John’s gospel last week started
off making explicit the connection between this sign and the lifting up
of Jesus on the cross.
Jesus is usually presented as being unafraid of the cross throughout
John’s gospel. However, our reading today includes acknowledgement that
Jesus admitted that his “soul was troubled.” Jesus is human. We always
have to remember that, because if Jesus is not fully human, how can he
save us and show us a better way to live that we ourselves can
emulate? The love of God that we understand through the life, death, and
resurrection of Jesus lifts us all up and calls us to transformation.
The metaphor of the solitary grain of wheat falling to the ground is a
homely, pastoral image, one to which many of Jesus’s followers could
relate. That single grain must fall to the ground to be buried before it
can spring to life abundantly and anew; otherwise it remains a single
grain—and in the original Greek the term actually means “remains alone.”
There is a message here for us, as Christians and as Episcopalians,
as well. Unless we as individuals are willing to be transformed—to let
go of our old life of suspicion, and hardness of heart, and fear– we can
have no trust in the love Jesus has for us, and we cannot be true
servants of Christ. We have to break through the rocky soil of our own
hearts to allow the seed of the promise of God’s love to grow. Likewise,
unless we as the Church are willing to let go of how we have always
understood ourselves, we too cannot break through to new life and new
growth.
