This moment in John 12:20-33 is the tipping point. Time’s up. Make your decision. And Jesus is surrounded by people who don’t understand that forgiveness is everything.
Even after resurrection, we refuse to forgive what we don’t understand.
Lent 5B | John 12:20-33
There’s a scene before this one. Before these Greeks come looking for Jesus. It’s a big scene full of resonance and timbre. But it’s also distracting; easy to mistake for the main stage. It’s more like the opening act. It warms you up and prepares you for what’s to come.
Perhaps it’s this event which draws these Greeks to Jesus. Something in their bones knows this healer is different. This moment is different.
The scene is simple: two sisters come to Jesus to save their brother, Jesus’s friend. His name is Lazarus. And the two sisters try to compel Jesus to move quickly, desperately, to save his life.
But inexplicably, Jesus takes his time and misses his chance to save him. Lazarus dies. His sisters, Mary and Martha are overwhelmed. They blame Jesus for their brother’s death.
Of course Jesus didn’t cause Lazarus to die, they know that. But they blame him anyway. Because he didn’t prevent Lazarus’s death. He didn’t save him from death.
How often do we blame others, not for what they’ve done, but for what we wished they had done? How much of our unwillingness to forgive other people is really about not forgiving ourselves?
Jesus was never going to save Lazarus from dying. And yet they blame him for what could be. Their anger isn’t at Jesus, really. Or it shouldn’t be.
And yet they blame him anyway. Because their blame helps them avoid taking in the reality: their brother was dying. And they didn’t want him to go.
Unbinding
Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead and tells the people to unbind him—that the burial wrappings were stifling the man who is now alive.
Word of this event most certainly traveled and drew people to Jesus like nothing else. But let us not make the same mistake Mary and Martha make.
Saving, like the saving of the world we heard about last week from John 3:16, is not the same thing as fulfilling our desire for the status quo, preventing the passage of time, or avoiding our pain.
Listen for the kind of saving Jesus is actually talking about.
Widening the Circle
It’s no accident that these people coming to Jesus were Greek. That they came to the disciple with the Greek name (Philip) from the integrated Hellenistic city, Bethsaida or that Philip would go to Andrew. Andrew is the one who keeps bringing the unlikely to Jesus.
The story of Jesus is spreading beyond the “in group”. Beyond those already promised to those who are being offered the promise. Or perhaps, for the first time, hearing the promise is for them, too.
Not just the men, but women. Not just the the landowning and the aged, but the poor and the young. And now, not just the Hebrew, but the Hellenist.
These other voices, experiences, circumstances are no longer stopping people from coming to see this one who raises the dead and brings freedom and hope to anyone.
But what they find when they arrive here in chapter 12 of John is startling. They don’t get a warm welcome with open arms. A chance to sit and chill with Mary at Jesus’s feet.
They meet a Jesus who tells them that their time’s up.
It’s Time
This isn’t the beginning of Jesus’s earthly ministry, but the end. We’re not giving people a year or three to prepare for this moment. This is the moment. So they have to make the decision now. Are they in or out?
It doesn’t seem fair, but it’s the matter at hand. They’re in Jerusalem. Jesus is preparing to face the Passion. And we, nearing the end of Lent are preparing ourselves to face the Passion again.
And the writer of John uses wordplay to highlight our struggle and the follower’s struggle with understanding what is really about to happen. Just like the sisters’ problem with the word save. This other word is a physical word: to lift.
To lift someone up, exalt them as a king or lift them into the air like the batter who hits the game winning home run. And this is precisely what all these people think they’re going to do to Jesus. They’re going to lift him on their shoulders and make him king.
And instead, Romans are going to lift Jesus up onto a cross and make him dead.
Then followers of Jesus over the centuries will try to explain away the latter as if it were the former.
Where God is Visible
If you’ve been reading along with Lent is Not Rocket Science, you might remember a reflection from a week ago when Bishop Knisely explains why oily puddles look like rainbows. And how revealing it is that such beauty was contained in a place of human waste.
“It’s the thinness of the oil film on the puddle that reveals the real colors that make up white light. It strikes me that this is an analogy to the way the “thin” places of the Earth, as the Celtic writers term them, allow us to experience the deeper reality that is all around us. When we are in a place where the separation between the heavenly and earthly realms is narrow or vanishing, we can see the beauty that undergirds our everyday experience. And how poetic in the case of the puddle rainbows, that it is the waste products left behind on the road that makes the place “thin.””
It makes sense, doesn’t it? The presence of God is most visible in mistakes or times of arrogance; not just on mountaintops but in the depths of valleys? Even in the cross or the Holocaust.
It’s a revelation about God that is as alien to our faith today as it was when Jesus tried to get it through the disciples’ thick skulls 2,000 years ago.
Like Mary and Martha’s mistake, their grudge and our witness. They must unbind their brother and forgive him for dying. And forgive Jesus. Not sometime. But now. It’s time.
Deciding to Forgive
We began our Lenten journey with a call to repent. To turn away from the ways of death and toward the new life offered by the faith of Christ.
Lent is a journey which richly reminds us of our mortality, our weakness, and our insecurities; but also our resilience, our opportunity, and our hope. It’s a time of preparation for those coming into the faith and for the community to face its own reconciling with sin. That we all learn to forgive.
This morning, as we’re in the outskirts of Jerusalem, preparing ourselves to take up our crosses, we are given a reminder that forgiveness isn’t an intellectual exercise or something which just happens.
It comes with a decision. That we may decide our mercy is more important than punishment. That our impulse for revenge, lifting up our enemies on trees, or locking them away in prisons, are not acts of Godly justice but human weakness.
That if we believe that Christ is exalted on a cross, then so were the insurrectionists with him. And everyone we choose to hurt we lift them up as our kings.
But like oily puddles, the worst in us reveals the beauty of God. Not as a justification for violence, but as hope for those with eyes to see from the middle of it. And see how thin the separation of humanity from God, this world from the kin-dom.
Each sin reveals its longing for forgiveness; our human imperfection and worldly arrogance a mirror, a light refracting the colors we can’t see. Our love and pain, God’s love and pain, our mutual longing for mercy.
We’re now approaching Jerusalem, we’re almost there. The time to forgive is at hand.