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That Enrapturing Vision

Hebrews 5: 7-9, John 12: 20-30 : Lent 5, Year B : 25 March 2012

Accustomed as we are to "All Welcome" signs outside churches, and to inclusive notions of invitation and hospitality in church circles, it can come as a shock to learn just how picky Jesus could be about whom he mixed with. Sure, he scandalised the righteous by consorting with those who were offside with the religious law, but these were fellow Jews, "the lost sheep of Israel," to whom he thought he had a primary mission. When he did come into contact with gentiles, which wasn’t very often, he could be downright rude, as in that celebrated incident with the Syro-Phoenician woman.

This standoffish behaviour was motivated by a Jews first mission strategy, that intended to first renew the children of Israel, so that they in turn could be a light to lighten the gentiles. But it was also a reflection of the rules governing Jewish life. You didn’t mix with outsiders unless it was absolutely necessary.

We might find that off-putting, but it was a way of preserving Jewish identity, and preventing them just merging in with all the other conquered people in the long, difficult years of exile in Babylon. And when back on home soil they had got matey with the locals, either the original inhabitants, or more recent arrivals, it had often turned out to be a bad experience, because of the seductive temptations of other cultures and their religious systems, which had a way of derailing the people’s attachment to the pure worship of Yahweh.

All of which helps to explain the involved palaver that those Greeks felt they had to go through to try and set up a meeting with Jesus. They work through intermediaries to put the request in, and it certainly has a galvanising effect on Jesus, but alas for the Greeks they don’t get to meet him, in fact they fade from view at this point in a rather puzzling manner. But all is not lost from their point of view, for the speech that Jesus gives, first to his disciples, then to a crowd outside, has huge implications for outsiders.

In fact Jesus regards the approach made by the Greeks as a defining moment in his ministry. This amounts to an acknowledgement of his claims by the outside world. He can now wind up his ministry to his own people, and then begin his ministry to the gentile world on the other side of the cross. The cross is the crucial turning point of the worlds. From this vantage point, having been "lifted up from the earth," he can "draw all men to himself." How will he do this?

Jesus speaks of being troubled by his approaching fate, and the epistle to the Hebrews expands this when it writes of Christ offering up "prayer and entreaty, aloud and in silent tears, to the one who had power to save him out of death." At one level there is the very understandable shrinking back from a cruel death by judicial execution. But there is much more to it than that.

Looked at from God’s point of view the dilemma involved in opening up a way of salvation for the human race looks like this. On the one hand human freedom must be respected. There is no point in overpowering or coercing human beings into acknowledging God. That would cancel out the possibility of a free response of love and faith, leaving only the need for submission.

On the other hand the human race must be freed from something. The hindering powers of evil and darkness that have human beings in their grip must be dealt to. Perhaps we have had the good fortune to be sheltered from all this, but make no mistake, radical evil is out there making life miserable for many. Something must be done about it if we are to be set free and delivered.

But what complicates the matter is that evil isn’t just out there as an external force. Every one of us has to some extent colluded with it, and allowed it entry into our inner most selves. At this point external evil becomes internal sin. It colours our habits, our affections, our attitudes, and our actions. And God must do something about that too. He can’t just declare an amnesty, and forget about it, for sin amounts to much more than just those dark corners of our lives that we are quietly ashamed of. At rock bottom it is what motivates human rebellion against, and rejection of God. It manifests itself in a constellation of human reactions to the possibility of God’s presence in the world, ranging from the calculating attitude that thinks, "so God is patient and forgiving, that should provide plenty of lee way for what I have got in mind," to, "I think I will take a break from following the way of Christ because it is all rather exhausting and demanding," to the indifference or militant atheism that has ingrained itself in western culture.

That vivid description of Christ’s distress in Hebrews refers to what took place in the garden of Gethsemane. When Jesus drank the cup of suffering he was draining to the dregs the accumulated weight of all that human rebellion against and rejection of God, and drawing it into himself. He had become a representative man for the entire human race, and as such he took all of our sins into himself, so that he could take them down into hell and leave them there. By leaving them in the infernal regions he de-potentiated the effects of human sin. All that nefarious activity still goes on in human affairs, but its potential to radically destabilise the destiny of the human race has been cancelled out.

And like a see saw, as Christ descends into hell to take our burdens down there, he is raised up on the cross to become what John’s gospel sees as the glorified one. By going down to the lowest depths of human lostness and alienation, he can then rise up to the heights of attracting glory. From this vantage point of apparent humiliation he has in fact reached the point of maximum usefulness in his ministry. From there he can draw all people to himself.

He does this by becoming the most beautiful thing in the world. God often works through what is beautiful in the world, but what took shape on Golgotha was not the kind of beauty you find in an art gallery. It was the concrete form of what God’s love looks like as it seeks us out in our lostness, and draws us to himself. This must become the most compelling vista of what loveliness consists of.

On the cross beauty, truth and goodness come together with an expressive power that radiates out to locate us and attract us. The sight of Christ on the cross has an enrapturing quality about it - it draws us out of ourselves to respond with glad surrender. In that sense there is a parallel with what happens when we see a picture, or a work of art, that deeply entrances us. As we gaze on it with wonder and fascination we forget about ourselves, and are drawn through into a dimension of consciousness and a quality of being alive that we scarcely knew existed.

The events of Holy Week have inspired some of the greatest works of art in western culture from Bach’s St Matthew Passion, to the paintings of El Greco. But in the actual events of Calvary there were some very unlovely things, as there must be in any painful and humiliating death. But this is the medium through which God most powerfully communicates with a world that majors in suffering, injustice and torment, and that has often lost a sense of what is genuinely beautiful, true and good. Even in the ugliness of a supposed troublemaker receiving summary justice on a hillside in a remote province of the Roman empire beauty was redefined, and became an enrapturing vision, that has one way or another reached out to every one of us.