John 12:20-33
For the last year since my youngest son was born, I have found myself thinking a lot about the differences between raising your first child and your second one. I am number three of four in my family of origin, but because there are big age gaps between myself and my siblings I sometimes see traits of youngest, middle and oldest in myself. So now that I am on the other side of things, as the one raising children, I am fascinated by these birth order differences, what is natural, what is learned, how much perspective matters, and so on.
One of the great things about raising a child the second time around for me is how much more accepting I am of things. After my first experience, I fully expected that my baby would wake up many times in the night for a long time, so it’s slightly less frustrating. I expected that the baby wouldn’t really care when I said “no throwing food on the floor” and I know that a lot of these behaviors will work themselves out so I can relax a bit and trust that a loving, compassionate and disciplining environment will eventually have an effect. So, while life with a three year old and a one year old can be a bit hectic, I do feel more relaxed, more accepting than I did the first time around with a baby.
It is amazing how powerful acceptance is. In my years of ministry I have found that the best way to demonstrate the love of Christ and not lose my mind as a pastor is to accept people for who they are. Sure, we challenge, encourage, instruct and nurture one another, but all of those things are more fruitful, more fun and less frustrating if we can also accept one another.
The same holds true with ourselves. When we are constantly beating ourselves up for our unique personality traits that we loathe, or feeling nonstop guilt for some part of ourselves, then we are unhappy, unproductive … stressed. I’m not a fitness or diet expert, but my guess is that our attempts at health, losing weight and exercise work much better if we start from a perspective of accepting ourselves, accepting how we look and working towards health and wholeness rather than talking badly about ourselves, hating how we look and beating ourselves up after every unmet goal. Acceptance goes a long way, accepting the struggles of parenting, the struggles of work, accepting our brothers and sisters in Christ, other people in the world and accepting ourselves.
In the Gospel reading today from John Jesus is calling us to acceptance. Jesus is asking us to accept him, accept his Father and accept the new reality his life, death and resurrection bring. But before we can accept this call/ accept his words, we should try our best to understand them, and this passage can be confusing. So let’s dig into the text a bit.
The passage begins with the arrival of some Greeks. It says that they want to “see” Jesus. The original language of the text implies much more than simply seeing with the eyes. Biblical scholar Francis Moloney explains that the verb used for seeing is associated with “the affirmation, the acceptance, or the refusal of Jesus’ role as the revealer.”* So these Greeks are here to decide if they will accept who Jesus says he is or not. And when Jesus hears of their arrival he says “the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” Or in other words, it’s time. Our Lenten journey is about to come to an end, everything Jesus has talked about will now come about. The cross is near. The fact that the Greeks have arrived signals to Jesus that word has spread, people from all over the world are coming to Jesus, it is time for what will come next.
So the Greeks and everyone else around listening to Jesus’ words are put in a place where they must either accept or deny the truth of what Jesus says. Will they accept that this man is who he says he is? Son of God? Salvation of the world? Savior of humanity? Or will they deny who he is and hold fast to what they know, what they are familiar with, what is around them- their day to day experiences, the joys and struggles of life … this world. Accepting Jesus means accepting a new reality, a world that extends beyond what we see in this life, beyond what we can attain in this world, deeper than our skin. Rejecting Jesus means holding instead to what we know, the powers that rule and govern us here and now.
So then Jesus says, “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.” Jesus is talking about the self-sacrifice that he offers, the gift to the world. Soon he will die and in doing so will bear much fruit. He will offer a new reality, a new relationship with God for all the world. His death is so that the love of God, the joy of salvation can be experienced by many. It is a gift. And, like any gift we can choose to accept it or not.
But acceptance is about more than just a nod of assent or holding on to hope. Acceptance of what Jesus says is also a call to follow him, to be transformed by this new reality, to have our motivations, perspectives, actions, outlooks, understanding of eternity changed. Acceptance of Jesus means accepting a challenge: “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”
It’s a little confusing. If you want to keep your life then you need to hate it? But if we are living out of love then we love others, we love our families, our friends, all of creation, and we love our lives. So why is Jesus talking about hating life? It is an unusual way to communicate a message of love, hope and peace. But here is the truth … we are all going to die. Life ends.
It is a harsh reality that we can either accept or try to deny. If we try to deny it, escape it or hide from it then we will close ourselves off from the world because death is all around us. Or we will live in fear, desperately trying to control uncontrollable circumstances, telling ourselves that we can somehow avoid death by doing, buying or accepting the right things. But if we accept the reality of death we are free from the fear, free from the denial, the running, the hiding. We can live in the truth. It is painful and difficult to accept, but in the end it is the only way to really live fully.
Jesus is calling us to accept our mortality. Accept that this life is not permanent, this world is not ultimate existence, the forces and figures that rule us now are not eternal, the temptations and lures of the world are futile and do not lead to lasting peace. But Jesus calls us to accept something else besides just the cold harsh fact of death. He calls us to accept a new reality. Not to dress in all black, throw our hands up and say “what does it all matter, nothing lasts.” Not to resign ourselves to hopelessness and meaninglessness. Jesus calls us to live into the reality of his life, death and resurrection. To accept that he comes from God. That his gift of himself means freedom for us. That our story is part of a much larger story of God, salvation and eternal peace. And acceptance of this frees us to live with peace in this life and the next. And in a confusing and unusual twist of what it means to be servant and master, Jesus tells us that if we follow him, then God will honor us. Jesus is calling for acceptance, calling for all to be drawn to him, to live in his reality and to be glorified with him.
It sounds good. Clearly, acceptance seems like the way to go. So then why is it still so hard? Even though we know life is not permanent and that there is nothing we can do about that, we still worry and misplace our priorities. We look to the accumulation of things and new stuff for happiness. We don’t take risks out of fear, we play it safe and end up watching life on a screen from the comfort of our how own homes. We become paranoid about illness and diseases and fearful for our health.
That one is hard for me. When my kids are sick I find myself remembering every terrifying story anyone has ever told me about childhood illness. A week ago a friend told me a terrible story about a child who died from strep. That night my son got a cough and I worried way more than I should have. It’s just so easy to forget that all of life is temporary. It is hard to let go of our desire to control everything. We love our comforts, pleasures, the people around us and we just want to cling to them as tightly as we can. It is hard to accept, let go and experience the freedom and peace that comes with that.
I have a good friend who has stage four breast cancer. She is my age and has three young children. It’s terrible and I hate it and I desperately wish it wasn’t so. She is such a strong-willed, spirited person and so well-loved that it’s hard to believe this is all happening to her. I feel like because of my experience as a pastor with people with illness that I can offer a space of honesty for her. I can be comfortable with the difficult things because I’ve been trained to be a comfort to people in difficult situations. Sometimes when I read the comments others post on her Facebook page, I think it seems like they haven’t really read her posts about her situation. Like when she said the goal is no longer a cure but quality of life. It seems sometimes like people ignore that and just try to act like she just needs to fight hard and make it through. Like people can’t accept what is happening.
A couple of weeks ago I went with her to the Cleveland Clinic for her chemotherapy. It was fun spending time with her and a really nice facility, but a crummy situation and a sad place. Waiting rooms filled with people nervously waiting for their treatment and their loved ones trying to be encouraging. I found myself thinking things like “she is so much younger than everyone here and she is doing so well and she is so strong, surely she can make it through…” We got to talking about the port that they put in her chest and how uncomfortable it was. I said “well, won’t they take it out?” She said “no.” I said “what if you have like a couple of years between treatments.” And my friend who is always joking around and teases me often, looked at me very seriously and with compassion in her eyes for me said “it’s never going to be a couple years between treatments.” I nodded … right … yeah. And I realized I was just like everybody else, not accepting the situation. Pretending that things would somehow go back to how they were. Sometimes it’s just so hard to accept the way things are.
Jesus knows that it is hard to accept the pain and suffering of life. In the Gospel reading he says “Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say–’ Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour .” His soul is troubled, he understands the urge to try to change the situation, shy away from the difficulty … But he has complete faith that God is going to see him through. He has complete clarity of purpose. He knows that his act will bring peace to all of humanity. So he accepts his fate. He accepts his role in the relationship between God and humanity. He faces the cross, he does not hide or worry or fear.
And because he does this, we can know peace. We can know hope. We can know that there is more to life than just self-protection, worry and pain. We can let go of our tight grip on the things we hold dear, trusting them to our eternal God. We can know that in this battle of darkness and light, the darkness does not overcome the light.
We are at that part of Lent when the cross is coming into view. Next Sunday is Palm Sunday and then Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. Let us use this time to shift our focus to the cross. To see a new worldview, a freedom from the oppression of this world and an invitation to let go and accept.
For the last year since my youngest son was born, I have found myself thinking a lot about the differences between raising your first child and your second one. I am number three of four in my family of origin, but because there are big age gaps between myself and my siblings I sometimes see traits of youngest, middle and oldest in myself. So now that I am on the other side of things, as the one raising children, I am fascinated by these birth order differences, what is natural, what is learned, how much perspective matters, and so on.
One of the great things about raising a child the second time around for me is how much more accepting I am of things. After my first experience, I fully expected that my baby would wake up many times in the night for a long time, so it’s slightly less frustrating. I expected that the baby wouldn’t really care when I said “no throwing food on the floor” and I know that a lot of these behaviors will work themselves out so I can relax a bit and trust that a loving, compassionate and disciplining environment will eventually have an effect. So, while life with a three year old and a one year old can be a bit hectic, I do feel more relaxed, more accepting than I did the first time around with a baby.
It is amazing how powerful acceptance is. In my years of ministry I have found that the best way to demonstrate the love of Christ and not lose my mind as a pastor is to accept people for who they are. Sure, we challenge, encourage, instruct and nurture one another, but all of those things are more fruitful, more fun and less frustrating if we can also accept one another.
The same holds true with ourselves. When we are constantly beating ourselves up for our unique personality traits that we loathe, or feeling nonstop guilt for some part of ourselves, then we are unhappy, unproductive … stressed. I’m not a fitness or diet expert, but my guess is that our attempts at health, losing weight and exercise work much better if we start from a perspective of accepting ourselves, accepting how we look and working towards health and wholeness rather than talking badly about ourselves, hating how we look and beating ourselves up after every unmet goal. Acceptance goes a long way, accepting the struggles of parenting, the struggles of work, accepting our brothers and sisters in Christ, other people in the world and accepting ourselves.
In the Gospel reading today from John Jesus is calling us to acceptance. Jesus is asking us to accept him, accept his Father and accept the new reality his life, death and resurrection bring. But before we can accept this call/ accept his words, we should try our best to understand them, and this passage can be confusing. So let’s dig into the text a bit.
The passage begins with the arrival of some Greeks. It says that they want to “see” Jesus. The original language of the text implies much more than simply seeing with the eyes. Biblical scholar Francis Moloney explains that the verb used for seeing is associated with “the affirmation, the acceptance, or the refusal of Jesus’ role as the revealer.”* So these Greeks are here to decide if they will accept who Jesus says he is or not. And when Jesus hears of their arrival he says “the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” Or in other words, it’s time. Our Lenten journey is about to come to an end, everything Jesus has talked about will now come about. The cross is near. The fact that the Greeks have arrived signals to Jesus that word has spread, people from all over the world are coming to Jesus, it is time for what will come next.
So the Greeks and everyone else around listening to Jesus’ words are put in a place where they must either accept or deny the truth of what Jesus says. Will they accept that this man is who he says he is? Son of God? Salvation of the world? Savior of humanity? Or will they deny who he is and hold fast to what they know, what they are familiar with, what is around them- their day to day experiences, the joys and struggles of life … this world. Accepting Jesus means accepting a new reality, a world that extends beyond what we see in this life, beyond what we can attain in this world, deeper than our skin. Rejecting Jesus means holding instead to what we know, the powers that rule and govern us here and now.
So then Jesus says, “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.” Jesus is talking about the self-sacrifice that he offers, the gift to the world. Soon he will die and in doing so will bear much fruit. He will offer a new reality, a new relationship with God for all the world. His death is so that the love of God, the joy of salvation can be experienced by many. It is a gift. And, like any gift we can choose to accept it or not.
But acceptance is about more than just a nod of assent or holding on to hope. Acceptance of what Jesus says is also a call to follow him, to be transformed by this new reality, to have our motivations, perspectives, actions, outlooks, understanding of eternity changed. Acceptance of Jesus means accepting a challenge: “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”
It’s a little confusing. If you want to keep your life then you need to hate it? But if we are living out of love then we love others, we love our families, our friends, all of creation, and we love our lives. So why is Jesus talking about hating life? It is an unusual way to communicate a message of love, hope and peace. But here is the truth … we are all going to die. Life ends.
It is a harsh reality that we can either accept or try to deny. If we try to deny it, escape it or hide from it then we will close ourselves off from the world because death is all around us. Or we will live in fear, desperately trying to control uncontrollable circumstances, telling ourselves that we can somehow avoid death by doing, buying or accepting the right things. But if we accept the reality of death we are free from the fear, free from the denial, the running, the hiding. We can live in the truth. It is painful and difficult to accept, but in the end it is the only way to really live fully.
Jesus is calling us to accept our mortality. Accept that this life is not permanent, this world is not ultimate existence, the forces and figures that rule us now are not eternal, the temptations and lures of the world are futile and do not lead to lasting peace. But Jesus calls us to accept something else besides just the cold harsh fact of death. He calls us to accept a new reality. Not to dress in all black, throw our hands up and say “what does it all matter, nothing lasts.” Not to resign ourselves to hopelessness and meaninglessness. Jesus calls us to live into the reality of his life, death and resurrection. To accept that he comes from God. That his gift of himself means freedom for us. That our story is part of a much larger story of God, salvation and eternal peace. And acceptance of this frees us to live with peace in this life and the next. And in a confusing and unusual twist of what it means to be servant and master, Jesus tells us that if we follow him, then God will honor us. Jesus is calling for acceptance, calling for all to be drawn to him, to live in his reality and to be glorified with him.
It sounds good. Clearly, acceptance seems like the way to go. So then why is it still so hard? Even though we know life is not permanent and that there is nothing we can do about that, we still worry and misplace our priorities. We look to the accumulation of things and new stuff for happiness. We don’t take risks out of fear, we play it safe and end up watching life on a screen from the comfort of our how own homes. We become paranoid about illness and diseases and fearful for our health.
That one is hard for me. When my kids are sick I find myself remembering every terrifying story anyone has ever told me about childhood illness. A week ago a friend told me a terrible story about a child who died from strep. That night my son got a cough and I worried way more than I should have. It’s just so easy to forget that all of life is temporary. It is hard to let go of our desire to control everything. We love our comforts, pleasures, the people around us and we just want to cling to them as tightly as we can. It is hard to accept, let go and experience the freedom and peace that comes with that.
I have a good friend who has stage four breast cancer. She is my age and has three young children. It’s terrible and I hate it and I desperately wish it wasn’t so. She is such a strong-willed, spirited person and so well-loved that it’s hard to believe this is all happening to her. I feel like because of my experience as a pastor with people with illness that I can offer a space of honesty for her. I can be comfortable with the difficult things because I’ve been trained to be a comfort to people in difficult situations. Sometimes when I read the comments others post on her Facebook page, I think it seems like they haven’t really read her posts about her situation. Like when she said the goal is no longer a cure but quality of life. It seems sometimes like people ignore that and just try to act like she just needs to fight hard and make it through. Like people can’t accept what is happening.
A couple of weeks ago I went with her to the Cleveland Clinic for her chemotherapy. It was fun spending time with her and a really nice facility, but a crummy situation and a sad place. Waiting rooms filled with people nervously waiting for their treatment and their loved ones trying to be encouraging. I found myself thinking things like “she is so much younger than everyone here and she is doing so well and she is so strong, surely she can make it through…” We got to talking about the port that they put in her chest and how uncomfortable it was. I said “well, won’t they take it out?” She said “no.” I said “what if you have like a couple of years between treatments.” And my friend who is always joking around and teases me often, looked at me very seriously and with compassion in her eyes for me said “it’s never going to be a couple years between treatments.” I nodded … right … yeah. And I realized I was just like everybody else, not accepting the situation. Pretending that things would somehow go back to how they were. Sometimes it’s just so hard to accept the way things are.
Jesus knows that it is hard to accept the pain and suffering of life. In the Gospel reading he says “Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say–’ Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour .” His soul is troubled, he understands the urge to try to change the situation, shy away from the difficulty … But he has complete faith that God is going to see him through. He has complete clarity of purpose. He knows that his act will bring peace to all of humanity. So he accepts his fate. He accepts his role in the relationship between God and humanity. He faces the cross, he does not hide or worry or fear.
And because he does this, we can know peace. We can know hope. We can know that there is more to life than just self-protection, worry and pain. We can let go of our tight grip on the things we hold dear, trusting them to our eternal God. We can know that in this battle of darkness and light, the darkness does not overcome the light.
We are at that part of Lent when the cross is coming into view. Next Sunday is Palm Sunday and then Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. Let us use this time to shift our focus to the cross. To see a new worldview, a freedom from the oppression of this world and an invitation to let go and accept.
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