17/3/24. (Passion Sunday) St Peter’s Birkdale Holy Communion
Jeremiah 31:31-34 John 12:20-33
Imagine yourself in Jerusalem at the time of the gospel. You are one of Jesus followers - not one of the inner circle, you don’t know Jesus especially well - not like the twelve who were always with him - you might only have talked to him a few times - one to one - but those times you’ve had his full attention have changed you, he’d seen the truth of who you are now, but that was OK because he also saw the truth of who you could become and in company with him that change no longer seemed impossible.
Something you heard Peter say once, ‘Who else could we follow, Lord? You are the one who has the words of life.’ And you can say yes to that - it’s what talking to him felt like. And you’ve seen his words of life in action, you were there when he raised Lazarus from the dead - you still find it hard to believe your eyes. Not that it made Jesus popular with the religious authorities - he’d never been flavour of the month, but raising Lazarus turned the heat up a notch.
some went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. Then the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin. “What are we accomplishing?” they asked. “Here is this man performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.”
Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, “You know nothing at all! You do not realise that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.” So from that day on they plotted to take his life.
Therefore Jesus no longer moved about publicly among the people of Judea. Instead he withdrew to a region near the wilderness, to a village called Ephraim, where he stayed with his disciples.
The chief priests and the Pharisees had given orders that anyone who found out where Jesus was should report it so that they might arrest him.
Jesus was in danger - and he was dangerous to know - the closer he and his followers came to Jerusalem the tenser the atmosphere. If the disciples had said to Jesus, ‘When we celebrate Passover this year could you try and blend in’ - it would have been hard to blame them
But that was never his way, even so when he started to make arrangements to ride in on a donkey as publicly as possible in a way that unmistakably fulfilled prophecy, their hearts must have sunk. As his follower your heart sinks too. There is danger and there is dancing in the dragon’s jaws. Is he going to drag you down with him.
But … Jesus rides in, the crowds roar for him and then …. nothing happens.
The disciples must have been on a high ‘Coming in to Jerusalem like that wasn’t so crazy after all, He must have known this would get the people on his side, the temple authorities have had the wind taken out of their sails.’ Relief.
We know things that they didn’t know. We know Jesus has set his face on the path that will lead him to the cross, the disciples don’t.
Inevitably we see everything from Palm Sunday onwards as Jesus’ end game- they didn’t.
So when Philip and Andrew go to Jesus about some Greeks who want to see him it feels like getting back to normal. Until what Jesus says points in exactly the direction they had hoped to avoid.
First he says, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.’ In John’s gospel talk of glory is talk about the utterly human Jesus displaying the utter fullness of God’s presence - Look at him, this is God in the flesh - But then Jesus says , unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.
It’s an image that’s easy to map Jesus’s future onto. Jesus, God the Son, is here to work the possibility of mercy into the fabric of human life and the only way that can happen is through his death. In purely human terms what did it cost him to walk this path for our reconciliation? At least as much as it would cost anyone else. The coldblooded courage he shows required just as much from him as it would from us. He had no exemption from fear and pain.
But Jesus is talking about more than what is going to happen to him He is speaking of the pattern of life for his people ‘Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honour’ What do these words mean for us?
As followers of Christ this is a pattern we attach ourselves to - the seed must die. We know where that took Jesus but for the vast majority of us following him doesn’t mean martyrdom, it doesn’t even mean as I rather expected when I was younger that God’s will for me would be to force me to do the thing I least want to do. It’s hard to look at Jesus and his friendships, the way he dealt with people and believe he valued misery for it’s own sake.
What following Jesus should do is shift our priorities, our ultimate loyalty. At the very least the seed going into the ground so it can bear fruit means my recognising that my life is not all about me.
We are all called to follow Jesus - but our call does not come in a vacuum.
It is in the middle of our own actual not theoretical lives, in the midst of its real possibilities, responsibilities and challenges that we each have to work out how to best play the cards we have been dealt in the service of his kingdom of justice and reconciliation.
We are not called to be self denying for the sake of it, not called to a one size fits all pattern, however onerous or virtuous. We are called to bring all that we know of who we are to all that we know of God, which will not always be easy. If we do it with integrity sometimes it will feel like a wrestling match.
And so we wrestle...In the preface to ‘The Splash of Words’ Mark Oakley writes about scripture in a way that can be expanded to include our whole relationship with God. ‘To take the bible seriously does not mean shrinking it into your own particular system of thinking about God, others and yourself. To take the bible really seriously means engaging with the variety of its texts, its history, the cultural, interpretative and ethical questions that need addressing, as well as the similar questions they ask of us. It is to invite the comfort and the unease of their inspiration, artistry, open-endedness and teasing of human pride. We mustn’t close down the conversation with texts. We spend a lot of time asking whether the bible is ‘true’ and miss the fact that the biblical texts are often asking us ‘Are you true?’ This is the real question that readers of the bible should face - others are a distraction -’
The trouble with a question like ‘Am I true?’ is that whilst it’s obviously important it’s hard to be quite sure what it means
On Friday’s Thought for the Day Richard Harries gave a hint of an answer. He talked of being being shaped by the assumptions and prejudices that were part and parcel of the culture he was born into, some of which he now sees as clearly wrong and he wondered how many of those prejudices were still swirling around in society, indeed how many of them were still lodged in his own understandings.
Being true means learning to recognise and confront some of the evasions and self-deceits by which we usually live our lives. It’s part of the work of Lent but not a work we do alone Jeremiah speaks of God’s help
“I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
The reward is that the more we can lose of the baggage that skews our understanding of ourselves and the world around us the closer companionship we can have with Jesus as we walk in his way.
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