Margie Quinn
The world is after Jesus. Here is a man who, in one of his final magic acts before being killed, has just raised a man from the dead. People are flocking to see him; crowds have come from all over to witness this miracle maker. Some of these people want to meet him because they recognize him for who he is: the one who comes in the name of the Lord. While others like the chief priests, flock to him with anger, wanting to kill Lazarus, as John 12:11 puts it, since it was “on account of Jesus that many of the Jews were deserting and were believing in Jesus.” Maybe if they kill Lazarus, they can squash this concept of a man who shows signs of resurrection. All eyes are on Jesus, good and bad. In verse 19, the Pharisees say, “the world has gone after him.”
The world is after Jesus. The Greek translation of “world” here, as Walter Wink reminded me this week, is kosmos. Kosmos doesn’t mean the “world” as in God’s creation but a fallen world alienated from God, in opposition to God’s purposes. Better put, “world” here means the System. The System, which is embodied in the structures and institutions that aggressively shape human life and seek to hold human beings captive to its ways. Does this sound familiar? The System thrives under exploitation and domination and violence. And there is someone in their midst who is messing with the status quo and challenging the System.
So the World, the System, is after Jesus.
Let’s spend some time walking through this passage. We begin this story with a little game of telephone. Some Greeks want to see Jesus. They find Phillip and ask him. He finds Andrew, then they both find Jesus to tell him. He replies, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” Jesus’s death is imminent, and he knows it. He goes on to tell them that 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. This probably goes over Phillip and Andrew’s head. Jesus breaks it down a little more in verse 25: Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in the world, will keep it for eternal life.
Who hate their life in the world. Those are some strong words, and ones that I have wrestled with this week.
I love my life. I love the ease with which I can move through the world, never being afraid of what may happen if I’m pulled over by the police, never feeling like I’m the only person of my identity in a room, never wondering where my next meal will come from or if someone will refuse to officiate my wedding based on who I love. Rarely has the System worked against me. But here, that annoying, convicting Jesus strikes again. Are you willing to remove the blinders of your life in order to hate this System so that you may find eternal life? Are you willing to expose the System for what it really is and do everything in your power to work against its death-dealing ways?
Most days, I am not. I wonder if Jesus had a few days where he didn’t want to, either.
Jesus continues to talk to Phillip and Andrew saying, “My soul is troubled.” Again, the English translation here weakens the force of the Greek verb, tarasso, which is more like “severe sorrow or pain.” Jesus is in deep pain, knowing what is to come; knowing that the powers-that-be are so threatened and intimidated by him that they need to eliminate him; knowing that he must expose the system for what it is: a way of death, not life.
“What should I say?” he asks. “Father save me from this hour? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.”
It reminds me of Frodo Baggins in Lord of the Rings. Frodo, in a moment of deep pain, looks at Gandalf and says, “I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.” Gandalf replies in a gentle yet convicting voice, “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”
With the time given to him, Jesus knows that it is short and it is coming to an end but there is still time to show God’s people how to hate the world.
Now the judgment of this world, he says. Now, the ruler of this world will be driven out. On the cross, he exposes the System for what it is and in doing so, he judges this world and casts out its oppressive rulers. He’s ready, however begrudgingly, to look violence in the face and reject it.
A lot of people have tried to make sense of what’s going on at the cross. You’ve probably heard many of these theories. One theory is that Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross is a blood offering that he must make on behalf of all of us to an angry, demanding God; a price to reverse all of the sins and disobedience God’s people had participated in and to be the Scapegoat on behalf of us. But John isn’t interested in the Son of God paying a ransom for our individual sins. He’s interested in how Jesus’s death is necessary and life-giving because as a result of it, a Beloved Community is formed. When we turn inward, when we act as single grains of wheat, we miss the abundant fruit of this community waiting for us on the other side of death. We have to relinquish the life that the world offers us each day in order to follow and serve Jesus.
The world is after Jesus, and in his final act, he knows the kind of death coming for him. “I love my life,” he may think, “but I hate this world so alienated from the inclusive, radical, freeing love of God. I’m going to expose this world for what it truly is.”
I love my life, Dr. King may have said to himself many decades ago, but I have decided what to do with the time given to me. When the people drinking the poison of White Supremacy turned hoses and dogs on black and brown activists who were marching non-violently, Dr. King shouted, “Let them get their dogs and let them get their hose, and we will leave them standing before God and the world spattered with the blood and reeking with the stench of their Negro brothers.” “It is necessary,” he went on, “to bring these issues to the surface, to bring them out into the open where everybody can see them.”
Let them get their nails, Jesus may have thought. Let them twist a crown of thorns. I will expose the System for what it is, so that all people are set free to die to a life shaped by captivation and domination and can live fully and freely in the life of me, the life of abundance.
We may love our lives, but are we willing to lose our hold on them in order to oppose a status quo that steps on our brothers and sisters who are suffering?
Finally, Jesus says, “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.” By being lifted up on the cross, Jesus fights for all of humanity to be reconciled to him. The fruits of Jesus’s death is the faith community to come, the one that shows Jesus’s love to the world. No pressure church, but guess what? We are that community. We are this community that has the burden and the blessing of showing Jesus’s love to the world, and that is not a call just to be nice or comfy or reach out with a little bit of condolences, it is a call to die to the lives we love in order to fight against a System that is killing people. Killing their spirits, killing their souls, killing their confidence and killing their bodies.
“It is by holding too tightly to our lives,” David Dark writes, “that we lose them.” “It is by letting go of our lives that we enter into life most profoundly.” That’s scary stuff.
I love my life. But if I can die to it, the temptation to be the single grain, if I can die to it to look around me at the suffering, if I can die to it, I just might be able to hate the world, the System, with Jesus. The Christ who exposed it continues to expose it today. Are we willing to look around and join him?
May it be so.