Beyond the Patio

It Is Time
John 12: 20-33
 
“The hour has come for the son of man to be glorified…”

It has become a common joke that when you travel with children that you are hardly out of the driveway and they are asking “Are we there yet?” And you have hours and even days left before you get “there” .  I’m certain that you can think of some adult equivalences to that. I have a similar kind of feeling when I’m reading John’s Gospel, because for the first eleven chapters he is always saying  “My hour has not yet come” and you begin to think, “Well when is it going to come?”

When his mother comes to tell him that they have run out of wine and the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee, he says, “Dear woman, why do you involve me…my time has not yet come” (2:4)

When Jesus is staying in Galilee, his brothers come to him and say that he ought to go to Judea in order to show is miracles and show himself to the world, and Jesus says, “The right time for me is not yet come…” (7.6) In fact as if they didn’t get it the first time, he repeats it in verse 9.

Then Jesus finally goes to Jerusalem and people get all riled up and plot to kill him, and just after he teaches in the temple court, John adds “At this they tried to seize him, but no one laid a hand on him, because his time had not yet come.”

Are you getting that feeling? When IS his time going to come? What is he referring to when he says “His time”.

Then again in the temple, when he talks about his rather and Him being one, and was considered by many to be blasphemous John says again, “Yet no one seized him, because his time had not yet come”

Now in this Gospel that we had this morning, some Greeks  came to see him, saying “we want to see Jesus”. Now he says,

“The hour has come for the son of Man to be glorified.”

We are finally there.

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What does it mean to be THERE, to have finally arrived?

It has something to do with the Greeks. One writer points out that these are different people than the Jews that he was normally dealing with. They looked different, they talked differently, they dressed differently, they eat differently …they probably even smelled differently.  But they are a sign, a definite sign that whatever Jesus was here on earth to do, it was not just for any one group of people but for all people.

What was it that he came to do? We could say, “To die on the Cross”,  In fact the Greeks who came to see Jesus will not see his true glory, until they see his death on the Cross.

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How is the Christ glorified by dying?  I think that it is because the death on the Cross is the ultimate act of Love.  It is the final act of a life totally lived  for others.  It is like Jesus saying to all of us, “You wanted to know what God is really like, so take a good look at the Cross. This is the extent to which God’s love will go for all people, a love that is completely giving, sharing and self sacrificing. This makes everything else that I have been doing come more clearly into focus, a life completely lived for others.”  We can be assured of that God loves us in this most amazing way. As the final verse in the old hymn When I survey the wondrous Cross puts it:

Love so amazing, so divine
Demands my soul, my life, my all

Dorothy Sayers has an interesting piece on Jesus’ life in her document Bread and Wine and what had to do in caring for all people often acting against the established order of things which ultimately led to his death on the Cross.

He assaulted indignant tradesmen and threw them and their belongings out of the Temple; he drove a coach-and-horses through a number of sacrosanct and hoary regulations; he cured diseases by any means that came handy, with a shocking casualness in the matter of other people’s pigs and property; he showed no proper deference for wealth or social position; when confronted with neat dialectical traps, he displayed a paradoxical humor that affronted serious-minded people, and he retorted by asking disagreeably searching questions that could not be answered by rule of thumb. He was emphatically not a dull man in his human lifetime, and if he was God, there can be nothing dull about God either. But he had “a daily beauty in his life that made us ugly,” and officialdom felt that the established order of things would be more secure without him. So they did away with God in the name of peace and quietness.

In the Gospel this morning Jesus goes on to say:

“Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also.” (John 12:26)

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It is Time for us to follow in The Way of Christ.

Often in following the ways of Christ and finding our true selves and mission in the world,  we have to go against the norms that have been established in the world in which we live as Jesus did. It also can be costly. Tony Campolo writes in his book “Let Me Tell You a Story” a piece called “Who Are We”:

In “the movie Civil Action, John Travolta plays the role of a lawyer representing the plaintiffs in a civil suit brought against a large corporation because of that company’s irresponsible polluting of the environment. Chemical waste is being dumped into the rivers in a particular town in Massachusetts, causing cancer to break out among the townspeople.

Unfortunately, this lawyer and his small firm are no match for the tremendous legal services the corporation can buy. Little by little, the corporation exhausts the lawyer’s financial resources and destroys his firm. In one highly dramatic scene, the lawyer stands before a bankruptcy judge and declares that fourteen dollars and a portable radio are all the possessions he has left in the world. The judge responds in amazement, “Where are all the things that you should accumulate in life in order to give you your identity?”

That single line speaks volumes. That is actually how the world in which we live evaluates the worth of an individual. Money and things establish a person’s identity

For Christians, things and the things money can buy do not establish identity. Christ does that.  By giving ourselves away, and sacrificing all we have for Christ and the Kingdom, we establish who we are and mind something significant in our lives.

(Tony Campolo Let Me Tell You a Story, Word Publishing, Nashville, 2000 pg.100)

It is time for us to witness in any way we can

It also means to love in the same self sacrificing way, caring for others even if it means an inconvenience in our own lives

People have come to this conclusion in many ways.  I was interested in a small passage in Tuesdays With Morrie (Mich Albom, Doubleday, New York, NY 1997), the story of a man, Morrie, dying of ALS and giving his last words of wisdom to former student of his, Mitch Albom,  who visited him every Tuesday during his final weeks of life, even though it took a lot of rearranging of his own life schedule and job commitments. But Morrie needed the loving care that Mitch could give him and Mitch needed know and give this kind of love. It was important for the meaning of his life. Morrie says after Mitch’s first visit:

“Mitch, you asked about caring for people I don’t even know.  But can I tell you the thing I’m learning most with this disease?”

What’s that?

“The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.”

His voice dropped to a whisper.  “Let it come in. We think we don’t deserve love, we think if we let it in we’ll become too soft.  But a wise man named Levine said it right.  He said, ‘love is the only rational act’

He repeated it carefully, pausing for effect.  “Love is the only rational act.”

I nodded , like a good student, and he exhaled weakly.  I leaned over to give him a hug. And then, although it is not really like me, I kissed him on the cheek.  I felt his weakened hands on my arms, the thin stubble of his whiskers brushing my face.

“So you’ll come back next Tuesday?”  He whispered

Of course Paul said it well in the 13th chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians

“And now faith, hope and love abide, these three: and the greatest of these is love.” (Verse 13)

The reason the Cross is at the center of our faith and a symbol that we always keep before us, is that the kind of Love that is expressed on the Cross is our ultimate concern and often means even acting against the established order of things.

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It is time for us to act as a community of faith.

We must remember that we are not alone in this work.

There is a book entitled In His Steps by Charles Sheldon (written in 1896, now available in electronic format and can be either read online or downloaded). It is considered to be the tenth most widely read book in the world. It is a novel about people in a certain congregation who made a pact that they would not do anything in their lives without asking the question, “What would Jesus do?” After a year they were totally different people.  We often talk of two different kinds of faith.  One is MIND faith, that is giving intellectual assent to a belief in God, in Christ, and in the Holy Spirit.  The other is a HEART faith. It involves the whole person in a trusting act of self surrender.  What happened in the people in the book was that their mind faith was turned into a heart faith and marvelous things began to happen.

“What Would Jesus Do?” or WWJD has become a popular catch phrase in these times.  Sometimes I think that it is spoken by a lot of people and not really done by a lot of people.    However, it is “What would Jesus DO?”, not only what would Jesus think, feel or even say.  For me it is the same as asking “What Does Love Demand?” Love is finally something that we do.

The Gospels are about what Jesus did.  His words were always supported by action.  He always acted in love to the extent that he would even die on the Cross in an act of love. If we can surrender ourselves to his way of life and really live by WWJD and allow his Spirit to freely flow through us, we will find our lives and the lives of those around us changed in ways that we can hardly imagine.  Our mind faith can turn into a heart faith.

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There are many people like the Greeks in the Gospel this morning who want to see Jesus and the only way that many of them will see Jesus is through us, but they will only see Jesus in us if our lives are centered in Jesus and his way of Love.

They are looking at you this morning and saying, :”We want to see Jesus”

It is time for the Son of Man to be glorified IN YOUR LIFE

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