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The God Who Dies Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis April 5, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill John 12:12-13:38
The end was near. His hour had come. For the last time Jesus enters Jerusalem. In the other gospels he has wandered around the Judean hills, turning his face toward the place of crucifixion only at the last; but in John, Jesus cannot stay away from the city, the temple, the death dealers, the darkness. Here there can be no triumphal entry because the crowds have seen him so many times before. This day they gather in great numbers, John says, because they have heard about Lazarus being raised; they want to see, again, the One who was able to perform such a sign. So too the details of preparation from the synoptic gospels are missing this morning: the journey to Bethany just above the Mount of Olives, the sending of two disciples to find a colt never ridden; the securing of an upper room for the supper. Rather in John, while the crowds are shouting “Hosanna!” Jesus simply finds a young donkey and sits on it. He does this, I think, because John wants us to know, before we leave with palms waving, what sort of king Jesus is not. Therefore the crowds in John bring to mind Greeks coming out to receive a Hellenistic sovereign into their city; Jesus hears in their "Hosannas" a hail to the chief; and when the bystanders cry, "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord," John pointedly adds, "the King of Israel." Therefore, says John, Jesus finds a young donkey and sits on it in protest. The gesture is lost, of course, on the people and the chief priests and on Pilate who orders Jesus’ cross inscribed with the words: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” The gesture is usually lost on us as well, given our inclination to skip from palms and pomp…over Christ’s death…to the alleluias of Easter morning. We too have come out to behold a King whose promise of immortality is as much as we want to hear, to bow down to a king not unlike the king in Eugene Ionesco’s “Exit the King” now enjoying a revival on Broadway. “You’re going to die in an hour and a half,” says Queen Marguerite, the acerbic first wife of King Berenger I. “You’re going to die at the end of the show.” So it is, for an hour and a half, sometimes like a vaudevillian actor, other times like a circus clown, though finally more and more like Macbeth, strutting and fretting his hour upon the stage until the last syllable of recorded time, King Berenger I goes down to dust as does the kingdom he has ruled for four hundred years. Ben Bradley opined in his review last week that Berenger is more frightening than other figures who meet their end as the curtain falls because “you know that the seedy, power-addled egomaniac onstage—who’s working overtime to dodge his own mortality—is, quite simply, you.” Quite simply, working overtime, you and I refuse the limit drawn by God like a parenthesis around the end of human existence and want nothing much to do with Jesus’ death either. Apparently we cannot help ourselves in this regard. Or can we? “I told myself that one could learn to die,” wrote Ionesco, “that I could learn to die, that one also can help other people die. This play is an attempt at an apprenticeship in dying.” So, I would venture to guess, is John’s gospel. But first we must do business with the king whose refusal of death we know best. The king who rules our lives lives, in the first place, as though he can control the duration of human existence. “What did you say, my dear?” Berenger asks. The Queen repeats: “You’re going to die at the end of the show.” “Yes, Sire,” confirms the Doctor, “you are going to die….” “Who could have given such orders, without my consent?” blusters the King. “I’m in good health….I’ll die when I want to. I’m the king. I’m the one to decide.” In the same manner we wield our own illusory power akin to that of a king’s scepter, asserting our privileged prerogative to the finest health care, signing up for aerobic exercise three times a week, eschewing red meat as much as possible, consuming mega-doses of antioxidants. “We are in good health!” we protest. “We will die when we want to!” “It’s a question of will power,” says Marie, also a queen and Berenger’s doting second wife. “You can control the whole situation by will power.” And until the kingdom that is our human existence begins to crumble, we think the same. Then in the second place the King lives as though he had all the time in the world. Under his rule, the urgency, the gratitude, the gravity of life given to those who have a sense of “time left” eludes us. “At fifty, you wanted first to reach your sixties,” lectured the Queen. “And so you went on from sixty to ninety to a hundred and twenty-five to two hundred, until you were four hundred years old. Instead of putting things off for ten years at a time, you put them off for fifty. Then you postponed them from century to century.” “But I was just about to start,” cries the King. “Oh! If I could have a whole century before me, perhaps then I’d have time!” We have been lulled by the powers that be into living—often smugly in our first few decades of life--as though we had all the time in the world. I think, in contrast, of Mozart’s letter to his father on the fourth of this month in 1787: “I never go to bed without thinking that, young as I am, to-morrow I may no longer be. Yet there is none of my acquaintances who can say that I am morose or sad in deportment. And for this happiness I thank my Creator every day, and wish it for my fellows from the bottom of my heart." Bowing down to a King who would keep us from numbering our days, we are fated instead for the tantrum of Solieri when our number is finally up! “Grazie, Signori! Grazie,” we say with our fist raised to the heavens. In the third place, this king is a king who lives as though he could cheat death by making a name for himself in human history. “Oh, please make them all remember me!” implores the king with less than an hour left to go. “Make them weep and despair and perpetuate my memory in all their history books. Make everyone learn my life by heart….Let the school children and the scholars study nothing else but me, my kingdom and my exploits.” Put another way, we learn in his kingdom to live as though our lives were about us: our wants, our needs, our bliss, our achievements, our honors, our accolades. Death therefore threatens us with being everlastingly forgotten unless we should do something memorable, something downright immortal. “Alas,” says the King, “I’m only present in the past.” Though finally as the minutes tick down to the final curtain, the King cries out almost prayerfully and as if in the naked voice of Ionesco, “Help me, you countless thousands who died before me! Tell me how you managed to accept death and die. Then teach me! …Help me to cross the threshold you have crossed! Come back from the other side a while and help me!” You and I confess that only one has come back from the other side and that one is able, even now, to help at the hour of our death. “Go to dark Gethsemane” the old hymn begins. “Learn of Jesus Christ to die.” No doubt we soon will cry out in another crowd for his death in order to deny for a little longer our own. But in these few remaining moments before he breathes his last, let us learn of Jesus Christ to die. In the first place, learn of him to trust God that your life and your death are in God’s keeping. Put another way, control is not our lot. Put another way, be not anxious about your life or your death. [Curious that people of faith are statistically more inclined to demand extraordinary means at the end of life!] According to John, Jesus is barely troubled at the near prospect of his death. Rather he mocks the anxious prayer Matthew, Mark and Luke have put in his mouth at Gethsemane: “And what should I say,” he asks Andrew and Philip rhetorically, “‘Father, save me from this hour? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.” Who knows? Living in such trust may even set us free to dare something brave before we lie to die. In the second place, learn from him to inhabit the time—no matter how brief or prolonged--with gratitude, as though it were a gift, because it is; never going to bed without the thought that tomorrow you may no longer be; knowing that your days, every one of them, belong to God. Because each moment of his thirty years was lived in relation to God, Jesus dies as he has lived: to God. Therefore with the urgency of one who wills God’s will rather than a victim going to an unjust death, he tells Judas “Do quickly what you are going to do; he goes out to meet his betrayer, comes forward to ask for whom the crowd is looking, identifies himself as the man they have come to arrest, saying to Peter as he puts away his sword, “Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?” Then as the curtain comes down and before he bows his head or gives up his spirit, Jesus says only, “It is finished”: accomplished, completed, fulfilled, brought to an end…the end being love. To learn of Jesus Christ to die is to live in time, no matter the length of our days, confident that God will bring to completion the good thing God has begun in us. In the third place, learn of him to live the life given you by God to live accepting,” in the words of philosopher Glen Tinder, “not only the state of being ignored but the prospect of being everlastingly forgotten” by human history. “Because you do not belong to the world,” Jesus told the eleven at the end, “but I have chosen you out of the world—therefore the world hates you.” Paradoxically what we thereby learn in his dying is the way of God’s love, a love that does not grasp but is spent completely on the other. “In this is love,” says John elsewhere, “not that we loved God but that God loved us and gave his Son….” God could not love us more or better or other than the way God has loved us in the life and death of Jesus Christ. Friday is God’s earnest that in the end neither fame nor fortune nor good looks matter: only the love that has led us to lay down our life for our friends. “For soon we shall die,” wrote the mistress of one who perished on Thorton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Ray, “and soon all memory of those [who have perished] will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” Thanks be to God that we know love’s name, even Jesus Christ, who has loved us to the end. |