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When Darkness Wins the Day Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis March 16, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill John 12:1-36
John’s gospel, more than any other, majors in the theme of misunderstanding. The disciples are forever missing the point: nodding with approval at a parable whose meaning had completely passed them by; mistaking metaphor upon metaphor for actual fact; zealously fending off the very ones Jesus had come to save by grace. More culpable for their confusion are the religious leaders who become, in John's telling, the greatest offenders against the truth. Time and time again, they claim to possess the light without as much as a nod to him who is the Light. Then there are the crowds following him everywhere but finding, when they arrive, only a miracle worker or a magician. By the time we arrive at John’s 12th chapter, however, misunderstanding is not the word for the actions of those assembled by this author for the drama of Christ’s passion. Here the malevolent nature of our discipleship begins to rear its righteous head: misunderstanding is replaced by malice and the darkness we have mistaken for light appears to win day after day. Judas is the easiest to accuse. While Martha served and Mary anointed Jesus’ feet with costly perfume the night before this morning, you can imagine Judas leaning on the door post of Lazarus’ house in Bethany and with folded arms asking, "Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii (a year’s wages) and given to the poor?" It was what Matthew and Mark had no disciple in particular ask, at the house of Simon the Leper, about the actions of an unnamed woman. But for John it is Judas (in parentheses he adds just in case we might misunderstand, “He who was to betray him”) asking among friends after the politics of his Lord lest darkness win the day! Judas, I hate to admit, is the liberal among the twelve. In Karl Barth's words, he is one “who would prefer ultimately to use the power of this devotion for something which his own judgment considers to be better; one for whom Jesus is finally less important and indispensable than this better thing…For him (discipleship) is not an end in itself but a means to some other end.” Judas is the one who later will pit music and arts in the church against outreach, for instance, finding the praise of God frivolous in the face of human need. Judas stands at a distance to judge Jesus by way of his social agenda rather than his social agenda by way of the Christ. What appears to have held Judas in the circle of the disciples these three long years was his hope that society would be reordered justly when Jesus came to power. But appearances finally are not allowed to pass for truth in John’s gospel. The protest voiced at the doorpost was not because Judas cared for the poor, John tells us, but because he had his hand in the till (Or was it that people assumed he was a big giver when, in fact, he was just a big talker?). He was a thief…altruism acting as a cover for avarice! John knew that soon Judas would sell his Savior for thirty pieces of silver, a fact which led John to reserve his harshest judgment for Judas’ highest motives. Put in the context of our lives, if Christ cannot be made the means to our ends, if to our enlightened politics he counters with a demand for our singular devotion, then for little less than our souls we will be done with him before the week is out. The cause can go on without a Savior to justify it and the Savior can go hang…on a cross. What John knows about our politics, what brings him to conclude that we with Judas are more apostate than apostle, is simply the fact that the Light has come into the world and for a price, we prefer that the darkness win the day. It is light enough. Now if Judas is the liberal writ large, then John’s crowds can be counted on to uphold the conservative banner in any age. “Hosanna! Blessed be he who comes in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel!” is, in truth, a nationalistic shout against a collective fear that seldom is acknowledged: a fear that God's mercy might be wide enough to include the very ones the crowds were certain Christ had come to condemn; a fear that this righteousness of ours has gotten us, in the end, the very same love lavished on every potential prostitute who would wipe Jesus’ feet with her hair; a fear that Jesus’ reign would signal an end to any hope of our own. Moreover if in one crowd today we would crown him King in order to restore the nation to its former position of power and glory, then in another crowd on Friday we will condemn him who has refused to fight the darkness as we have essentially defined it. No doubt we walk in the same nationalistic darkness that characterized the crowd lining the streets of Jerusalem. We long for a leader who will return us to the stature of a nation among nations; Israel longed for the same. But nationalistic fervor is simply a manifestation of the darkness of narcissism. We would identify Jesus with the lost cause of our selves, with our own self-interest, with the penultimate loyalties through which we critique him as our personal savior…or not. What I know of us this morning, of all of us, is that we live mistaking our politics for his own. Therefore it is in the context of the mixed and mean political motives of human beings just like us that John places the story of Jesus’ last journey to Jerusalem. Though understand this: John’s Jesus is no victim! In every instance he takes the initiative and directs the inexorable events that will lead to the cross. Whereas the other gospel writers have Jesus wandering around the Judean hills and only turning his face toward the place of his death at the last, John’s Jesus cannot get away from Jerusalem. Beginning with the cleansing of the temple in John’s second chapter, Jesus is drawn to the city, the temple, the death dealers and the darkness time and time again. For the last time now, he enters Jerusalem as one who knows and is known by the city. Therefore there can be no triumphal entry, no pomp and palms strewn before him as if he were a new arrival. Instead we read in John that people have come out to greet him in great numbers—both Jews and Greeks which is to say the whole world--because they have heard about Lazarus being raised and want to see again the One who had performed such a sign from God. But that is only the first twist of John's Palm Sunday account. All three of the synoptic gospels give us the same report concerning the beginning of the day: “When they were approaching Jerusalem, at Bethphage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples and said to them, ‘Go into a village ahead of you, and immediately as you enter it, you will find there a colt that has never been ridden; untie it and bring it.’” John’s Jesus does no such thing. Rather while the crowds are shouting "Hosanna!" Jesus--on his own--finds a young donkey and sits on it, citing the words of the prophets Zephaniah and Zechariah, words that in context confirm Christ has come not to a nation but to the world. In response to the crowd’s politically transparent tumult, Jesus protests with prophetic action. The point of his finding a donkey and sitting on it is not humility as it seems to be in the other gospels (John omits “humble and riding on a donkey” from the prophecy). It is an action meant to fly in the face of the crowd’s nationalism and narcissism, in the face of Judas’ ambition and avarice. But John would have us understand more. Taking charge of his passion, in a moment Jesus will tell Judas to do quickly what he is going to do. But now we read of no agony in the garden, no praying if it be God’s will to let this cup pass from him. Rather Jesus stops the parade to speak to the crowd of his death. “What should I say?” Jesus asks, “‘Father save me from this hour?’ No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father,” he commands, “glorify your name.” God’s imprimatur takes the form of a voice from heaven—a subtle transfiguration--leaving the crowd stunned. This death-bound Savior is not the savior they had in mind. The Messiah lives forever, they say in so many words. How can you speak of your death? Who are you? Jesus enigmatically answers, “The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that darkness may not overtake you….” After that, says John, he departed and hid from them. There is a sense in which, given our present darkness, he is still in hiding on this dark, damp day of palms and pomp: the week has been too full of death, of despair, of hopelessness, of scandal, of political palaver for it to be otherwise. But for the author of John’s gospel, the opposite is true. John’s Jesus has entered the city precisely for such a time as this: has come into town for those who walk in darkness and do not know it…for those who dwell in the land of deep darkness and have no idea how to get out of it…for those who have preferred the darkness instead of the light and are about to perish because of it. From the beginning, John's Jesus has come because God so loves the world. God loves the world in this way: that God has sent the only Son as Light to shine against the darkness in which we walk, as Truth to counter the lies we have come to believe, as Life to triumph over the death we all must die. Though there is one last little detail in John's narrative, a redemptive detail from the night before, worth noting. “Mary took a pound of costly ointment of pure nard,” says John, “and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair.” A small detail, I know, but in two of the gospels--Mark and Matthew--the unnamed woman anoints his head: a regal sign that he is King, an act that would have pleased the crowds who woke to wave their palms. But in John, Jesus’ feet and not his head are lavished with expensive oil. The act is an act of penitence and deep devotion…an act of preparation for the darker days ahead…and leaves us on this day of palms to ponder the parabolic politics of God. For in the determination of John’s Jesus which includes the betrayal of Judas, the denial of Peter, the disciples who forsake him, the crowds that turn on him, our politics of misunderstanding become the occasion for the revelation of God’s redeeming purposes. God in Christ assumed the human condition that knows only enough to separate and divide in order that the common order could be redeemed, in order that nothing in life or in death can finally separate us from the love for which we were made: neither the arrogance that would place our cause before his cross; nor the desires that would order our life apart from his purposes; nor the fears that have kept us from the glad proclamation of his mercy. Love one another, he commands, as I have loved you. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another. In the light of Mary’s anointing, he enters Jerusalem not as one nation’s King but as every sinner’s confessor. So let him be that to you in the week that stretches before us. Let him carry to the cross all the fears that have bound you. Let him bear for you the dark nights of malice and misunderstanding. Cast upon him the betrayals whereby you have followed him as a means to your own ends. Then together may we be found at his cross on this Friday next, equally pensioners on his grace, then all alleluia as darkness goes down to defeat in the light of the Easter dawn of God’s reign. Thanks be to God! Amen. |