Lent V, Cycle B

Text: John 12:20-36

Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks.  ²¹They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”  ²²Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus.  ²³Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.  ²⁴Very 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.  ²⁵Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.  ²⁶Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also.  Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.

²⁷“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.  ²⁸Father, glorify your name.”  Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.”  ²⁹The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder.  Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.”  ³⁰Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine.  ³¹Now is the judgement of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.  ³²And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”  ³³He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.  ³⁴The crowd answered him, “We have heard from the law that the Messiah remains forever.  How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up?  Who is this Son of Man?”  ³⁵Jesus said to them, “The light is with you for a little longer.  Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you.  If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going.  ³⁶While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light.”  After Jesus had said this, he departed and hid from them.

Tom, our music director, and I have many spirited conversations about things such as the Resurrection of Jesus.  With Jack Good, author of The Dishonest Church, I contend that many at OCBC find it difficult to believe six impossible things before breakfast.  Tom contends that there are many here who find the intellectual rigor of this place to be, at best, creeping Universalism (after all, that is what Harvard Square is known for!) and, at worst, heretical and apostate.  I say this, not in any way to be flip or hurtful, nor do I wish to be dismissive of anyone’s faith, but rather to open up this conversation.  It is time that we should all talk with each other about such things!  We are too small, too fragile a community to have within ourselves two churches.  We need to be “one body.”

Inexorably, we’re headed into the season of death and resurrection, and whatever our personal feelings and convictions about these theological matters, it is without question that this series of events, depicted in all four of the Gospels, is central to our way of understanding in the Christian West.  According to the Fourth Gospel, Jesus said, “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.”  It is thus Jesus, himself, (or, depending on your point of view, the writer of the Fourth Gospel speaking through the mouth of Jesus) who provided this exquisitely metaphorical understanding of the events of Holy Week.  “Unless a grain of wheat should fall and die . . .”

That metaphor has lived and breathed through Western culture from the day of its authorship ‘til now.  In an ancient Anglo-Saxon song, John Barleycorn, the personification of the barley, encounters great suffering before succumbing to an unpleasant death.  However, as a result of this death bread and malt are produced; therefore, Barleycorn dies so that others may live.  Finally his body will be eaten as the bread, and drunk as beer.  A popular hymn, "We Plough the Fields and Scatter," is often sung at Harvest Festival to the same tune.

Some would see John Barleycorn as the remnant of a pagan practice.  It has also been suggested that "John Barleycorn," an early form of the song, may have been used by the early church in Saxon England to ease the conversion of pagans to Christianity.  The reasoning behind this idea is that John Barleycorn represents the ideology of nature cycles, spirits, and the harvest of the pagan religion but early missionaries Christianized the song in order to show John Barleycorn as a Christ-like figure.

The myth lives, as anyone who has seen the Christmas Revels here in Cambridge knows.  And the death and resurrection motif lives on in our culture in so many other ways: Billy Budd, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Grapes of Wrath, and even Berthold Brecht’s Threepenny Operae all are books and theatre which play on the deep rootage in our psyches of dying and rising again.  All their main characters portray an aspect of the Christ in Passion, the Christ in Glory.

I have said for a long time that the central tenet of my Christian faith can be found in the Roman Catholic Mass.  And, to my mind, it is wrapped in entirely metaphorical, but nonetheless theological language.  It is the affirmation, “Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again.”  I see this as the central way of a Christian understanding of the world.  In order to heal, one must die to that which binds one.  It is the only way to experience Resurrection.  And, though I may be cynical and unoptimistic about the powers of this world, I have hope, and I have hope, again, because of the metaphor “Christ will come again.”  I have no idea how; I could not point to it or draw a picture of it, nor can any rational equipment that I may possess lead me to that conclusion.  It is, for me, the ultimate Kierkegaardian leap, but I do affirm it, for, elsewise, life itself would be pointless.  I think one could never find a more counter-cultural philosophy of life.  The notion that one must die to rise, certainly does not show up in Pepsi commercials and flies in the face of the notion that Coke adds life.

But, for whatever reasons, we are in the post-Enlightenment world, and some of us need more than poetry.  Some of us need more than metaphor.  At my ordination council in the United Church of Christ, I was asked if I believed that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ was something that could have been photographed.  If memory serves, I dodged the question with a flip remark: I said, “I don’t believe cameras had yet been invented.”  And yet, any of our seminarians could be asked to testify in this way at these critical junctures of ministry, despite hours of classroom time devoted to the many intricate and complicated traditions that feed this belief and leave even the “true believers” a little dazed.

So, as we head into Holy Week, Good Friday, and Easter, let us simply be mindful that we are a community bound together in the love of Christ; let us be careful about stepping on each others’ belief systems; but let us not back off from challenging each other in those beliefs.  For we know that, in this place, being a follower of Christ is what is most important.  And following and believing are two separate things entirely.

Let’s talk.  Let’s all talk.  To this end, I’m going to switch the agenda for today’s post-worship Christian Ed class and ask that we come together to discuss this sermon and our sense of what this central tenet of the Christian faith means to us, as individuals, and as a community.  Let’s talk.  Let’s walk into Easter as one people, following Jesus.