March 21, 2021 “Dying Glory” – John 12:20-33

John 12:20-33 March 21, 2021

“Dying Glory” Fifth Sunday of Lent

One of my wife’s favorite poems is about Gerard Manley Hopkins grief at seeing a long row of poplar trees cut down by the village of Binsey near Oxford in England where my daughter now lives. It begins,

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled.
Of a fresh and following rank
Not spared, not one…

The line that Beth often quotes is a bit further on, as the poet reflects on the havoc human beings wreak on earth, even when we mean to do well,

After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.

Hopkins poem, “Binsey Poplars,” is a sad reflection on how glory in this world is often destroyed or killed, and many times soon forgotten. The message of John’s Gospel is that the glory of God, coming to us through Jesus, is greater and more durable than the fleeting glories of this world. Unlike the glory of a beautiful natural place, or of a human nation or building, the glory of Jesus was actually completed and made greater in His dying.

John started his story of Jesus in chapter 1 verse 14 by telling us that “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory.” Then in the rest of the book we see Jesus do just seven miracles, carefully chosen out of all the rest to be the signs of Jesus’ glory. They begin with the water changed to wine and end in the chapter right before our text, with the raising of Lazarus from the dead.

Despite all the glory of those miracles, John lets us in on the incredible fact that there is more to come. In chapter 7 verse 39, it says that the Holy Spirit had not yet been given to those who followed Jesus “because Jesus was not yet glorified.” Then here in chapter 12, Jesus Himself says that “the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” The “Son of Man” was Jesus’ term for Himself. He was saying that being glorified was an event yet to happen for Him.

The trigger for Jesus’ statement in verse 23 about His glorification seems weirdly unrelated. Verse 21 tells us that at the Passover festival there were some “Greeks.” They could have been dispersed Jews who lived in Greece but made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Passover. But the fact they were just called “Greeks” means they were not Jewish. Perhaps they were “God-fearers,” Gentiles who honored the Jewish God, or simply tourists come to gawk at quaint religious customs, like white European tourists who flock to Corinthian Baptist Church in Washington D.C. They pay to sit in the balcony and gawk at “authentic” Black worship, some of them leaving right as the sermon gets started.

However it was, those foreign visitors were Greek-speaking Gentiles. They came to Philip because he had a Greek name and came from a predominantly Gentile area in Palestine. He probably spoke Greek well and could understand when they asked, “Sir, we want to see Jesus.” It’s very clear that news and rumor about Jesus, including His recent raising of Lazarus, was circulating in the city. These Gentiles heard and wanted to see the Man for themselves.

In verse 22, Philip brought the request to Andrew, the other disciple with a Greek name. Together the two of them went to ask Jesus. That’s when a little disconnect appears. Jesus’ reply appears to have nothing to do with the Greeks. We never learn if they got to see Him or not. Instead, Jesus started talking about being glorified. “The hour has come” for that, He says. But why should the arrival and interest of Gentiles in seeing Jesus suddenly be the time Jesus starts thinking about being glorified?

The non-sequiturs don’t stop there with Jesus’ strange answer to Philip and Andrew. No sooner did He say it was time for Him to be glorified than He starts telling a little horticulturally incorrect parable about a seed in verse 24. He says a seed, a grain of wheat, in order to grow and be fruitful, needs to fall into the ground and “die.” Then it sprouts up into new life and produces a harvest.

Like other parables of Jesus, it would be a mistake to get lost in questions about the scientific accuracy of His portrayal of how plants reproduce. Seeds don’t die, except in the sense that, when they sprout and grow, they are no longer seeds. They are transformed into something else, something greater. They are, if you will, glorified. Which means, as John wants us to see throughout his Gospel, that being glorified, for Jesus, has much to do with dying. It’s dying glory, not in the sense that it is fading, but because it happens through dying. And it doesn’t just apply to Jesus.

The next verse, 25, applies that principle of glory through dying to anyone who wants the glory of eternal life. Love your life too much, try to hang onto it by any and every means possible, and you will lose it. But “hate” your life, in other words, love Jesus more than your own life, and you “will keep it for eternal life.” Jesus was not talking about despising yourself or being suicidal. He was talking about placing God and His kingdom above one’s own life. If that is your value system, it makes sense to let go of life in this world for the sake of something greater and more glorious. Which is exactly what Jesus did.

Verse 26 presses the point forward to declare plainly that Jesus asks the same of His followers, His “servants.” They are to be where He is, both in dying and in rising to glory. If Jesus aims to “fall into the ground and die,” then so must whoever wants to be with Him. But, as the end of the verse says, whoever serves Jesus in that way, “the Father will honor.” Glory will follow.

As I pondered on those words, I thought about the fallen, dying glory to be found in the damp forests here in the Pacific Northwest. It’s only a few years ago that Beth and I discovered the beauty in and around the Cape Perpetua Scenic Area on the Oregon Coast. Part of that discovery was a hike I’ve now taken several times to the giant spruce tree that soars above the forest there. One of the incredible aspects of the tree is a gap at the bottom through which a child (or a younger, more spry adult than I am currently) could crawl.

A helpful sign near the tree explains that the gap is the result of the tree’s start in life growing upon a nurse (or nursery) log. The seed fell upon a decaying downed tree and found the nutrients needed to begin life. As the new tree continued to grow, the nurse log completely decayed and disappeared, leaving the gap at the bottom. One can view younger trees and nurse logs in action in the same area and in other parts of the Pacific Northwest.

The context of this passage is just after Palm Sunday, which we will celebrate next week. It’s less than a week before Good Friday. When Jesus talks about His glorification in John’s Gospel, He is talking about His death on the Cross. In much the same way a fallen giant of the forest is “glorified” by new trees which arise from it, Jesus is glorified by being nailed up on a Tree before falling down in death to be buried. He gave His life so that others following Him and His example might keep their lives “for eternal life.”

Those fallen nurse logs in the damp forests of our region are beautiful images of how the lifted-up-then-fallen Savior of the world became the source of life for all who will affix their lives to Him. They in turn, like that giant tree there at Cape Perpetua, will one day fall and give their own lives to nurture others. Such is the way of the Tree which we call the Cross. Such is the way of glory.

As you think about that “way of glory,” dying glory, notice how Jesus handled glory. First, glory in dying is not easy, even for Jesus. With all the superhero movies in popular culture, we tend to think of our Lord more in those terms. Ancient people, even Jews, may have remembered stories of semi-divine heroes like Hercules or Asclepius whom I mentioned last week. Such heroes are more than human, not given to weaknesses and fears which you and I experience. But verse 27 lets us hear Jesus say, “Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour?’ No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.”

Verse 27 is sometimes said to be John’s version of Jesus’ agony and prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. In total humanity, He viewed dying with trepidation. At some level with which you and I resonate, He did not want to do it. In Matthew and Mark, Jesus in Gethsemane actually prays the request He only tries out here, asking as Mark 14:35 puts it, that “if it were possible, the hour might pass from him.” He says, “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet not what I want, but what you want.” As our text from Hebrews 5 said, “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death…”

It’s good to spend time here in these verses and in the Garden of Gethsemane, considering human glory. From Hercules to Superman, from William Wallace in Braveheart to John Wayne, we’ve led ourselves to believe that glory is achieved by ignoring fear, shouting a battle cry, and plunging heedlessly headlong toward a violent death. Sometimes we get the impression that’s what Jesus did. But He was more human than that, more real than that. He sought glory, but He understood how painful and costly it would be. He begged God to take it away from Him. And it wasn’t really His own glory He was after.

Jesus was deeply anxious and troubled about dying, but in the Garden, in Matthew and Mark, He deferred to His Father’s will. Here in verse 28, He phrases it as deference to His Father’s glory, “Father, glorify your name.” His first concern was not making a name for Himself. It was honoring His Father’s name in heaven. And the Father confirmed it. A great, loud voice from heaven said the Father would do just that. But the crowd didn’t get it. Verse 30 says some thought it was just thunder, while others thought an angel had spoken. The whole business of God glorified in Jesus’ dying went literally over their heads.

So Jesus made it even clearer. In verse 30 He told them that the voice was for their benefit, not for His. The suffering and death which troubled Him so much wasn’t being done to make Him into a hero. It was happening for their sake, for the world’s sake. Verse 31 says the present time of Jesus’ dying glory was for “the judgment of the world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.”

Remember again. This is right after Palm Sunday. Jesus came riding into Jerusalem, a bit like a conquering Roman hero. At least some of the people thought He was coming to lead them into battle like Mel Gibson’s William Wallace, to drive out Rome’s occupying force. But instead of a war horse Jesus rode a donkey. He prepared Himself not for battle, but for death by execution. No wonder it bothered Him so much. Instead of raising an army, Jesus pretty much just laid down and died. But not quite.

What we heard last week in John 3, we hear again in verse 32, Jesus is to be “lifted up.” He says, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” That word in Greek, “lifted up,” can also mean “exalted,” or “honored,” raised in people’s estimation. But lest we make a mistake, John follows up with verse 33, “He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.” In the moment, Jesus was not talking about winning glory like a hero, but about being hung on a cross like a common criminal, to die a death of shame and humiliation. He had not come to drive out the earthly enemy of Rome but the spiritual enemies of sin and death and the devil. His death had to be inglorious, even notorious, in order for that to happen.

If you missed it, the whole reading fits together now. It’s there at the end of verse 32. By being lifted upon the Cross, Jesus “will draw all people” to Himself. Those Greeks who started this whole train of thought, this strange disconnected sermon, had not been forgotten. They were the point. Those Greeks needed to see Jesus. All the Greeks, all the Gentiles, all the world needed to see Jesus. He had to die on the Cross to make it happen.

Jesus wasn’t just spouting random thoughts, jumping from His visitors to glory to seeds to hating life to being a servant. His thought went finally back to glory and finally back again to those Greeks who sought Him. It’s one of the many places in Scripture where the form of it all is a chiasm, named after the shape of the Greek letter chi, which looks like an “X,” like crossing lines which start at one place and bring us back to where we started. Those Greeks were the concrete evidence of a world that needs Jesus and so He explained how it was going to happen, through the Cross, and then promised that it would happen, that He would, in fact, draw all people to Himself.

That’s why the Cross is the central symbol of the Christian faith, why people all over the world have come to love and display with devotion what was once only the sign of a vicious form of capital punishment, of a miserable way to die.

In the middle ages, the Cross became so loved and honored that it became a great thing to have a little piece of it. There are still churches today which proudly display a splinter of wood claimed to be a piece of the “True Cross” of Jesus. In the Reformation, Protestants and some Catholics mocked the practice. Calvin said that all the supposed splinters of the Cross would have filled a ship. Even faithful Catholic Erasmus is supposed to have said that, for all the bits to be real, Jesus would have had to die upon a whole forest of trees. In reality, there probably never were so many of those purported fragments of the True Cross that it was as silly as it sounds, even if none of them were authentic.

What was authentic, though, was that desire for the Cross, for the dying glory of a Savior who knew our own sufferings and joined us in them. Jesus, after all, did tell us all to take up our own crosses and follow Him, to pick up, as it were, little splinters of the real thing and seek our own dying glory. He called us to be lifted up by laying down our own lives for others so they can receive the Good News of Jesus and have eternal life.

Christians don’t get glory by charging off in glorious battle against our foes, whether it’s literally against those doing violence to Christians or a figurative battle against cultural forces around us that seem opposed to God. No, our glory comes when we join Jesus in realizing that serving God, serving Him, means laying down arms and laying down our lives in sacrifice, letting ourselves die so that the Greeks of the world can see Jesus.

In a recent video from our Pacific Northwest Conference of Covenant churches, our superintendent Greg Yee interviewed Pastor Michael Thomas of Radiant Covenant Church in Seattle, a multi-ethnic congregation. Pastor Thomas told how their church witnessed to a Black man and his family. He had grown up Muslim, believing that Christianity was a white man’s religion. But coming to Radiant Covenant, the man discovered that Jesus had a place for him, that Jesus was for all people, not just white people. Pastor Thomas told us that Jesus was saying, “If you… make it about Me [Jesus], I’ll draw all people. If it’s Me that’s lifted up, I’ll draw all people.”

In other words, I’d say, if we keep charging off as Christian soldiers to win glory for ourselves, to establish our place in this world, people will keep on thinking what that Black man thought, that Jesus is not for them. But if we let Jesus be Jesus, the Savior who was lifted up on Cross, the True Cross which leads to dying glory, then Jesus will extend the reach of that Cross to everyone.

Jesus is drawing all people to Himself. He did it by dying. You and I need to die a little, or maybe a lot, to get out of His way. We may have to die to some privilege, to power, to preoccupation with our own needs and our own selves. But if we do, Jesus says we will be where He is. We’ll be like new young trees rooted on that old fallen giant in the forest. We’ll be carrying our own bits of the True Cross. We’ll be laying down to die so that new life can spring up in our decay. But we’ll be glorious in our dying. And the glory will not be ours, but the Father’s, through the Cross of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.