The Fifth Sunday of Lent

Sermon

The Fifth Sunday of Lent

17 March 2024

The Reverend Dr James Gardom

John 12.21

“Sir, we wish to see Jesus”

I think I first came across this verse when I was Anglican Chaplain in the University of Zimbabwe, in the 90s. It was engraved on the lectern in the ecumenical Chapel, and was clearly intended as a reminder to preachers about what their main job actually is.

We have dozens of mental images of Christ. Passiontide is about the Cross.  It is and it should be hard for us, because we love Christ. Jesus has entered our imagination. Maybe as children we will be brought up to love him. Through our adult lives, we have meditated on his teaching and his love for us. And now we have to think about him being crucified. It was harder for the early followers of Christ.  Our crosses are generally beautiful symbols, associated with hope, as in this church. I have counted 24 crosses in this church, most of them beautiful.

For the early disciples, the cross was a terrifying and stomach-churning reality, associated with traitors and slaves. It was the most humiliating death. It was harder still for Christ. We and the disciples watch and think. He experienced and died. And always, for Jesus, for the earliest followers of Christ and for us the question should be there, “Why was it necessary that the Christ should die?”

John’s Gospel this morning begins with a group of Hellenistic Greeks at the time of Christ were attracted to the ethical monotheism of the Jewish religion, and without taking on circumcision or the requirements of Jewish law they became “God Fearers”, sympathetic Gentiles.  They have come to Jerusalem for the festival, and they seek out people most like them from Jesus’ disciples, with ones with Greek names, from an area close to Greek speaking towns, – Andrew and Philip, to ask if they can see Jesus. Those God fearers are the beginning of the story that leads to us, Gentile Christians at St Bene't's in 2024. The Good News is breaking out, and is becoming Good News for all people.

Jesus answered them, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” When John’s Gospel says “Glorified” we know that we should always read and understand, “Crucified”.

The cross is the transforming thing about the Christian faith, and about Holy Week.  It gives us the most disturbing and convincing answer to the basic questions.

“What is God like?” “Look at Christ on the Cross”.

What is His relationship to the World?” “Look at Christ on the Cross”.

Where do I fit in to this? “Look at Christ on the Cross”.

What are the essentials of a life well lived? “Look at Christ on the Cross”.

As St. Paul says, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength. Passiontide is the time when we make our most concerted effort to make this reality real for us, in our hearts and not just in our hymns. How and why?

Two images – one of how it is done, and one of what it looks like when it has been done.

Making the cross real is done in part by the hard, almost physical, effort of keeping our attention on the Cross. In our Lent reading group this week we discussed “Quiet”. We talked about the difficulty of focusing on keeping our attention through times of silence. We do this most characteristically in Holy Week, at the Great Vigils. Being quiet, and focusing our attention on the cross is one of the hardest things that we attempt. Thinking about the cross, and knowing it and feeling it as God at God’s most characteristic and comprehensible. It is as if we are hard wax, or cold plasticene, and we need to be pushed as hard as we can be against the image of the Cross, so that the image will take, will sink in, and we be changed by our attention.That hard work is necessary because we are hard wax, like sealing wax. We need to let the meditation on the cross warm and change us. The hard work of Passion tide is the hard work of allowing our reflections on the cross to remake us.

What does that remaking look like?

You will sometimes see someone walking down the street jigging and twitching, and as you draw close you will see that they are listening to headphones, in a world of their own, marching to be beat of a different drum. A Christian in whom the knowledge of the Love of God in the Cross has taken root is like that.  Except that they are not in a world of their own. They are in god's world, dancing to god's tune.

We think, “Why did he do that?”, or “Where does her Love or Courage come from?”, and then you realise the person is attuned to a deeper and far more real reality than the illusions to which we give up so much of our time and energy.

So that is why we come to the cross at Passiontide.

Be attentive and the cross will remake your soul. Remake your soul and you will really see.