The Hour Has Come

Beth Newman
The Hour Has Come
John 12: 20-33
April 2, 2006

             Prepare our hearts, O God, to accept your Word.  Silence in us any voice but your own, that, hearing, we may also obey your will, through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen. 

            Have you ever noticed how adults will talk in code around children, when they don’t want them to understand something?  “It’s time to put her to B-E-D.” Or “Don’t let him see the I-C-E C-R-E-A-M.”  And you young people out there, you are usually much smarter than we give you credit for, and more often than not know exactly what we are up to.  We do this even with older children who know how to spell but still might struggle with certain concepts, such as death.  So we might say something like, “Fido has gone to sleep and isn’t going to wake up,” or “Grandma has gone to be with Jesus,” instead of saying in a straight forward way that beloved pet or grandparent has died. 
            In John’s account, Jesus used such euphemisms when speaking of his own death.  He often talks about his “hour,” referring to the time when he will be crucified and then risen from the dead.   You probably remember in the second chapter of John, when Jesus attended a wedding and the wine ran out.  When his mother pointed this fact out to him, his reply to her is, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me?  My hour has not yet come.”  When Jesus encountered the woman at the well, as he questioned her, he said, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. . . .   The hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth.”  As Jesus’ following grew, so did the attempts to arrest him.  In the seventh chapter we hear that “they tried to arrest him, but no one laid hands on him, because his hour had not yet come.” 
            The building momentum begins to peak in chapter 12, where we find our text for today.  This chapter begins six days before the Passover.  Jesus is at Lazarus’ home.  Both Jesus and Lazarus had grown in notoriety since the raising of Lazarus from the dead, and there were plots afoot to kill them both.  As Jesus made his way into Jerusalem, he was greeted with the waving a palms and shouts of hosannas.  The Pharisees saw this realized the depth of Jesus’ popularity and said to one another, “You see, you can do nothing.  Look, the world has gone after him!”
            Little could they comprehend how true their words would prove to be, for in the very next verse, two Greeks show up at the festival of the Passover.  The world, represented by these gentile foreigners, had literally “shown up.”  They approached Phillip, who then went to Andrew, who then both went to Jesus with the Greeks’ request to see Jesus.  Jesus answered their request, not by agreeing to see them, but by saying these words: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”  Finally, the hour had arrived.  His anticipated death was immanent.
            Jesus went on to describe in depth and with great understanding the meaning of his death.  And on this last Sunday of Lent, as we prepare to begin Holy Week with our own shouts of “hosannas” and with the waving a palms, perhaps it is good and right to take a moment and reflect upon the meaning of Christ’s death.  When we talk about Jesus death and what it means to us, we often use the word “atonement,” meaning “reconciliation”, the reconciliation of God and humanity through the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ.  Jesus’ death was no ordinary death, because we believe it opened up the way of salvation for us.  Jesus’ sacrifice somehow bridged the gap between us and God. 
As long as the church has been in existence, it has been doing atonement theologies.  One of the most ancient ways of understanding Jesus’ death, is that it was a ransom paid for sake of the world.  Jesus’ death bought the world back, literally from the devil.  But because Jesus was God, his sacrifice meant the redemption of the world and a victory for God.   Jesus offered himself freely as this ransom, and because he paid this ransom with his life, believers are no longer held in sin’s grip and can live into a restored relationship with God. 
            Another way of understanding of how Jesus’ death frees us from our sins is that Christ’s death is the sacrifice necessary to atone for human guilt and sin.  This understanding was built upon the tradition of the practices of the Temple, when sacrifices were brought and offered so that reconciliation between God and God’s people could be brought about.  When we talk about being “washed clean by the blood of the lamb,” we are using a sacrificial understand of the atonement of our sins.  Christ stood in for us, as the sacrifice God demanded, and thus bore our sins on the cross on our behalf. 
            A third understanding of the meaning of Christ’s death is that it functions as a moral influence on our lives.  His death was designed to greatly impress humanity with a sense of God's love, resulting in softening our hearts and leading us to repentance.  Jesus as perfectly human and perfectly divine is the one who came to live and die for us.  In him, in his living and in his dying, we see how much we are loved by God. (1)  
            These theories have helpful angles in which we might come to understand better how Jesus’ death affects us.  Each theory also has its flaws and weaknesses.  I bring up these traditional, historical ways that the church has understood atonement throughout the centuries in order to point out that here, in this particular text, Jesus presented something completely different.  He said that his hour had come, but then began to talk about himself using the metaphor of a seed, falling to the earth, and dying.  The other gospels use seed imagery, but those parables usually reflect the spreading of the news of the gospel, seed falling on rocky soil, weak soil, and fertile soil.  But here there is just a single grain, and it is Jesus.  It falls into the earth and it dies, but if it dies, it bears much fruit.  Jesus, a few chapters later during his farewell discourse to his disciples, goes into great detail as to what bearing fruit means.  “Abide in me as I abide in you.  Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.  . . .  Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.   . . . My Father is glorified by this, that you bear fruit and become my disciples.”
            This fruit of the seed is the life of the community of faith, those who gather because they believe that Christ’s death has the power to save them.  In other words, it’s us.  We are the fruit that has grown from the seed.  The life that we share together is what holds and bears the power of Christ’s death.  Jesus’ death is not understood as a sacrificed lamb or even as a ransom for our sins.  As one writer put it, “The faith community consists of those who redefine the meaning of life on the basis of Jesus’ death.  The faith community is the fruit of Jesus’ death; it is what shows forth Jesus’ love to the world.”   (2)

The Jesus of the Gospel according to John accepted his fate without a moment of struggle.  There is no Garden of Gethsemane angst; there is no agony in John’s story of Jesus’ crucifixion.  Throughout the entirety of John’s gospel, Jesus’ will and God’s will are thoroughly and completely one, inseparable.  And this will had a trajectory, made a straight line, toward the hour of Jesus’ death.  Incarnation is not just about this moment of crucifixion, it is about every moment of Jesus’ life thoroughly and completely lived out according to God’s will.  What Jesus’ death does for us, for the community that is the fruit of his death, is to make that same kind of relationship possible for us.  When we believe, when we choose to be a part of the community of believers, that reconciled relationship with God becomes the promise fulfilled in our midst. 
Consider this reconciliation as prepare to gather around this table today.  For here at this table we see, in the brokenness of Jesus our wholeness, our restoration, our atonement with God.  Consider this image of the seed dying and bearing fruit we prepare to share in this holy meal.  For here we come, as the community of believers, to commemorate in a particular way Christ’s saving death for us.  We say that the bread is his body and that the wine is his blood, and even though we don’t believe that these elements actually turn into his body and his blood, we believe that we are nourished by the cup and by the bread in a sacred and sacramental way, in ways that ordinary bread and ordinary juice, in our case, do not nourish us. 
This moment of communion is not one that is simply a private moment between us and God, for as we gather around this table, we believe that we are joined here with Christ and with all the communion of the saints.   Here we share in a foretaste of that ultimate restoration promised to us, promised to all of creation.  Here we get a glimpse of relationships made right in the presence of God.  Here we taste and see what is true about ourselves because of what Christ’s death means for us.  Here we know ourselves as the fruit of that seed that died willingly on our behalf, so that we may gather together, so that we might believe the good news: we are forgiven, we are reconciled with our neighbors and we are restored into right relationship with God.   Praise God for the saving death of our risen Lord.   Alleluia!  Amen.