5 Lent
B March 25, 2012
Jer. 31:31-34 Ps. 51:11-16
Heb. 5:1-10 John 12:20-33
Several times in the Gospels, it is written
that Jesus did not have honor in his own home, in his own time and in his own
country. And that is usually true of
great innovators; they encounter great resistance in their own time and place.
I have tried to use that same argument with
my wife and children in the past—brilliant but misunderstood—and they tend to
cite my cantankerousness rather than my brilliance.
Another truth of history is that when we die,
we become something other than what we were in our own time. Why?
Because context changes everything.
In their own contexts, Jesus and Paul did not
get that exorcised over the common practice of slavery. For many, many years, Americans did not get
too exorcised over slavery or women’s rights; there was no context for a
message of equal justice to be heard. So
contexts can indeed change drastically the meaning a person’s life and the
meaning of their values.
I believe that the New Testament books are
proof of how contexts changed the meaning of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In short, after Jesus was gone, he became
much better known than he ever was when he actually lived. So, the fame of Jesus after he was gone superseded
the fame that he had in his own time.
And the Gospel writings involve the attempt to connect his
post-resurrection fame with the oral traditions of his actual life. And we never really know how much of his
actual life we are reading about or how much of the lives of his
interpreters. It is all mixed together
and it is very hard or impossible to sort out.
What we can observe historically is that a
major shift in understanding Jesus occurred when Gentile followers of Jesus
began to outnumber vastly the Jewish followers of Jesus.
Since Jesus was a Jew with a message for Jews
in his own time, how can the future Gentile context for Christianity be
interpreted and seen in the life of Jesus?
If we understand this, we understand a major motivation for all of the
New Testament writings. If this were not
the case, then Rabbis in synagogues today might be reading some of the New
Testament writings as commentaries upon a particular messianic interpretation of
Jesus.
So the Gentile context changed the
understanding of the significance of the life of Jesus Christ. And we see that the writer of the Gospel of
John understands this in writing close to the end of the first century and into the early second century about 6 -9 decades after Jesus.
In
John’s Gospel we have read about Greeks who came and wanted to see Jesus. This occurs right after the account of the
resurrection of Lazarus. It is not
surprising that Gentiles or that anyone would be interested in
resurrection. Resurrection is the El
Dorado, the secret to eternal life.
Resurrection was the founding event of Christianity. When the Greeks came to seek Jesus, the
writer of the Gospel of John pens the discourse of Jesus about his glory or his
ultimate fame. And of course the
ultimate fame of Jesus happened after he was gone. The Gospel writer is trying to explain how
the potentially famous Jesus became the actually famous risen Christ.
And when one talks about potentiality one can
use the metaphor of the seed.
When someone invites you to their home to
show you their gardening ability, they don’t take you into the garage and show
you a massive supply of seeds that they have been keeping on the shelf. They show you the results of the seeds; they
show you the plants, the flowers and the trees.
They show you the plants that can reproduce many more seeds out of the
one seed that was planted in the ground and died. When one seed dies, it provides the next
generation of life and many, many future generations of life.
Why didn’t Jesus get left in the forgotten museum
of history? The purpose of Roman
crucifixion was to make a person forgotten forever to the life of people.
Jesus was lifted up on the Cross. The Romans thought that by lifting Jesus up
on the Cross, they could create a spectacle and so discourage any devotion to
him. On the cross the Romans lifted Jesus
up to public ridicule; but when the seed of his body was planted in the ground,
his resurrection gave birth to the Christ-life within the hearts of countless
millions of people who came after him.
The Roman and Gentile context that killed
him, eventually was totally converted by him. When we read the Gospel passion story, the
writers seem to blame the Jews more for the death of Jesus, when it really was
the Roman authorities who had all of the power.
This is an indication that by the time the Gospels were written, the
Roman citizenry were the ones who were filling the ranks of the Christian
communities.
We come into an understanding of the phrase:
Losing our lives to save them. If a
seed remains a seed forever, it has effectively lost its life. So conserving is dynamically opposed to the
nature of life. We never make our
potential actual, if we try to conserve a static state. It is only through that continual loss of
former states to gain future states that we can activate the dynamic gift and
purpose of our lives.
The message Jesus is very much in opposition
to museum religion, where we try to hold things as static artifacts of the
past, and we end up making our lives museum pieces that are alienated from the
realities of our actual lives.
So context changes everything. Jesus, the Christ, became something else in the
Gentile world than he was in his original Jewish context. The New Testament writings, focus their
interpretation on a suffering messiah in contrast to other interpreations of
the messiah in the Jewish community and so the writings exist as a result of
the split between Judaism and Christianity.
The New Testament chronicles the gradual shift of seeing Jesus of
Nazareth as a Jew amongst Jews, to seeing the risen Christ as a Son of humanity
and Son of God amongst all of the people of the known world.
In the history of Christianity, we have seen
many changes in the last two thousand years.
Historical contexts change the application of Christian meaning and yet
still claim the original Jesus as the chief source of inspiration.
In the history of my own life, the changing
context of my life means that I understand Christ differently now than I
understood him when I was sixteen, yet I am the same person who encompasses the
diversity.
I have become different in my later states
than what I was in my former states. So
I have lost a lot; I have died to former states of how the understanding of my
life has been constituted; but I have gained new states of understanding.
The seed dying in the ground and giving rise
to new generations of life is a metaphor for the life of Jesus becoming the life
of the risen Christ.
It is also a metaphor for the process of life
itself. Life is moving; pretending that
we can remain static is but a state of denial.
Another word for this process of renewal is called repentance. We are constantly being challenged to give up
former states of how we constituted the understanding of our lives and take on
new understandings and new purpose.
The witness of Jesus Christ invites us to a
realistic view about change in life; it invites us to expect the losses caused
by change. But the witness of Christ
also offers us the hope of great gain in what we will yet become. And this hope is anchored on the resurrection
of Christ.
Let us embrace the hope of great gain; the
seeds of the past has split their sheathes and become surpassing life. This kind of self-surpassing life is the life of
repentance to which we are invited by the witness of Jesus Christ. Amen.
