Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and St Peter’s, Poulshot
Hebrews 5. 5-10; John 20. 20-33
“Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”
Our Gospel reading this morning starts with one of those scenes in John that feels like it has been written in an intentionally surrealist way. It is set in Jerusalem, a few days before the Passover. The Passover was and remains one of the great Holy Days of the Jewish year. It is a celebration of liberation from slavery, of new life after a living death, that a long time ago was wrapped around an even more ancient festival celebrating the biological new life of springtime. This wasn’t any old Passover, either, but the one that would mark the end of Jesus Christ’s earthly life. During the build up to it, some Greeks come up to Philip, and say to him, “Sir, we would see Jesus.” He and Andrew go together to see Jesus.
But we never get to find out if the Greeks ever saw Jesus. Like characters in a David Lynch TV show, they now vanish from the story, never to reappear. Instead, Jesus gives Andrew and Philip a cryptic response, “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”
To make sense of all this, we need to remember what is unique about the Holy Week timetable in John’s Gospel. Does anyone know? Unlike the Synoptic Gospels, John shifts the day of Jesus’ crucifixion to Thursday. So Jesus becomes the Passover Lamb, the animal sacrificed by Jews, to this very day, to celebrate the deliverance of their ancestors from slavery in Egypt: Jesus too be sacrificed to deliver people from slavery—from the slavery of sin. More than that, in going into the ground he will bear fruit not only for the Jews, but for the whole world, and these mysterious vanishing Greeks symbolise that in Christ, delivery from bondage will now be opened to the whole human race.
This is why the people who set our readings paired this passage of John with this morning’s other reading, from the Epistle to the Hebrews. Not only is Jesus the Passover Lamb for the whole human race, but he is a great High Priest “according to the order of Melchizedek”, in other words a priest just like the Kohenites who were the only people permitted to perform the animal sacrifices in the Temple. These sacrifices were made for a variety of purposes, but some of them were offered in expiation for sin. It is not animal sacrifices in the Temple, however, that Christ the great High Priest offers, but Himself sacrificed on the Cross. And unlike the animal sacrifices which need to be continually repeated, Christ’s sacrifice of Himself is enough for the sins of the whole world forever.
We get these readings on this particular Sunday, because Passion Sunday is when we begin our journey towards the Cross. The mood shifts in Church, moves from the austerity of most of Lent to something darker and more painful, and the readings reflect that. “Now, is my soul troubled”, says Christ contemplating what He must endure next. A Christianity that cannot embrace the darkness, pain, and death that forms an inevitable part of everyone’s life can’t make sense of the world we live in.
“If any man serve me, let him follow me”, says Christ, and the one place that we know we will follow Him, whether we serve Him or not, is to our deaths. The old saying goes that: ‘Nothing in life is certain except death and taxes.’ Some people manage to escape the taxman, but nobody manages to escape death.
It is in that key, in recognition of our death being inevitable, that we must read the paradoxical statement from Christ that, “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.” All of us lose our lives in this world in the end. Christ does not promise us a smooth ride in this life, but that we shall be with him in eternal life.
This year of Our Lord two thousand and twenty-four is a nervous time in the world. I’ve picked up a definite jump in the level of fear in the last three or four weeks. It certainly feels like the end of an era, that we are about to go through a definite shift in the times, across the world, and that neither our political nor our Church leaders have quite picked up how dramatic this could be. I would love to tell you not to worry, but I often worry when I hear the headlines in the car or scroll through my apps. We feel like passive observers of events that are quite beyond our power to influence; yet which might have dramatic, even destructive, effects on our own lives.
There are three things to remember in this frightening moment. Firstly, Christ too worried, in this morning’s Gospel and elsewhere, as He felt the consequences of other people’s political decisions begin to overwhelm Him. Secondly, that strange word Passion we use for Christ’s final days comes from the same root as passive, like the passive form of a verb – Jesus, in these final days is someone who is “done to”, rather than being the driver of the action. So our worry, our sense of powerlessness, are entirely understandable to Christ, who is God. Thirdly, and most importantly, as our Gospel reading says, “the judgment of this world” has already taken place, in the Passion of Christ and His death on the Cross. God was in the world in the form of a human being and we didn’t even recognise Him, let alone make Him our ruler—instead we killed Him. So while it would be nice to think we were sailing off into golden future of endless rainbows, we’ve already known since that first Holy Week that an earthly utopia could never come to pass.
Good times end and golden ages pass. Everything in this universe is finite. Our lives are finite, most obviously, and those of every living creature; and on a long enough timeline the survival rate for everything drops to zero—empires and civilisations, the continents and oceans, the Sun, and eventually even the universe itself. One of our torments is to have our existence in time, where everything is subject to entropy and decay, and all things must come to an end.
Now, you must all have realised by now that I’m quite a sunny-natured person. I enjoy life, and I see the beauty of life and the humour in it. By God, I would encourage you to seize every golden evening and every rainbow. But golden evenings turn to night, and rainbows quickly fade, just like the animal sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem.
Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross was different; it was a divine action, and therefore not subject to time. Yet it wasn’t a fairy story; God’s suffering in human form on the Cross is real enough for a world where pain and death are so prevalent, and costly enough in the moral economy of a troubled world to pay the price of the sins of the whole world, forever. Just as there can be no rainbows without rain, there can be no eternal life without earthly death. That can sound trite, but I say it having, like you, seen my fair share of death. We are not wrong to fear. Even Christ feared His own death—but if we follow Him through our lives, we can trust that we follow Him into death and then enter His eternal kingdom, which never fades.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
Thanks to Pixabay for the Public Domain image towards the top of the sermon, sourced from Pexels.
