ROOM FOR GREEK STRANGERS? I suspect many of us might be more relaxed newcomers who seem to be like us. If we prefer to leave it to others to do the greeting when it comes to strangers who appear to be different perhaps this should be an indication of where we are in our Christian journey?
So, when some Greeks – who of course would have been Gentiles as far as Jesus’ Jewish disciples were concerned, turned up with a request – “Sir we would like to see Jesus”. What does Phillip do? We can imagine him thinking. “Foreigners – not like us. Probably foreigners with strange beliefs. Certainly not the sort who would fit in with us…..”
So is Philip very different from a good number of us of us in the Church today. I can imagine him saying to himself, “Well, it’s not for me to introduce these sorts of strangers to Jesus…. So I’ll find someone, someone apart from me, who can act as an agent on my behalf”.
So Phillip chose …?… Andrew. Remember elsewhere it was Andrew who has invited some others to meet Jesus…. If we had been in Philip’s place as today’s Christians, might we have referred the foreign strangers to the minister or Parish Steward?
Don’t be too surprised at Phillip. After all, from what we know of churches today would a group of mainline Protestants or Catholics be in a hurry to invite a Muslim, a Jehovah’s witness, or even a Russian Orthodox into their inner circle? Maybe, if they took the words from the example Jesus set, they should – but would they? – or more to the point, would we?
Do you think it a bit bizarre that the Greeks should even be there to meet Jesus? Gentiles were not part of the inner circle, so why were they there?
One commentator J H Bernard notes that since the account of Jesus clearing the Temple reminds us that event would have occurred in the Gentiles courtyard, and he speculates that perhaps these particular Greeks may have even witnessed that event and been sufficiently intrigued to seek out the man responsible for this daring act.
Perhaps here John (verse 32) may be reminding us that with Lent almost behind us the reality of Jesus is about to be revealed when he quotes Jesus’ words, “when am lifted up I can draw everyone to myself”.
There is no difference in what Jesus want from all his disciples from what he now requires from the causal Greeks checking out what getting involved with Jesus would mean when the chips were down. …. this is not merely a half-hearted choice which allows you to keep to your old way of life. “Whoever serves me must follow me.”
Do you think this may have always been a challenge. Ultimately it won’t be what we read. Even our own declarations count for little. We can announce we are Methodists or Presbyterians or Catholics – but whether we are new to the faith, even would-be followers like the Greeks, or for many of us, members of a particular Church with many years of membership behind us… it is not our status that counts but whether or not we are following the way that Jesus set out in front of his disciples.
By using his allusion of the seed that has to separate itself from its parent plant – in effect to die to its old self before it can set off its new life, Jesus confronts them with an uncompromising alternative. Soren Kierkegaard would probably identify it as the key feature of existentialism – the leap of faith.
………..the leap that no one can do for you.
I suspect that Jesus’ message is typically down–played, treated with caution by modern society and even by much of the corporate Church.
Modern society is based on the concept of material success and the achievement of status through the accumulation of wealth and possessions. To set these aside, is to reject what is commonly accepted as the only sensible way to live. Even in the corporate Church, the notion of individual response without someone to organize it on our behalf is just not how we operate.
While this no doubt gives us the assurance we are not acting alone, there is frequently an inertia, particularly when there is an assumption that we require the Church to act as broker before we can respond to how our conscience appears to lead.
Robert Funk sees typical religion as unfortunately something brokered by a whole raft of people on our behalf. The Archbishop or Church president selects and ordains the senior leaders, the senior church folk (often Bishops) ordain the clergy – and the clergy act as an intermediary between the congregation and the divine. And just in case we are expecting action on the issues that concern us, there is usually a ponderous committee structure to navigate. While we have clearly become more democratic in our processes, we should be honest enough to see the end-result is that the Church no longer typically gives clear lead on issues of conscience.
I guess that is not new.
In the Second World War for example, in Germany it was only the individuals acting alone who could bring themselves to stand against Hitler. Those individuals were not waiting for their actions to be mediated for them. Less than 10% of the Lutheran Church clergy spoke out and, as it happens, even today the Roman Catholic Church is continuing to defend itself on a frequently expressed charge for their past -support for the Nazis.
On the world scene, for years the traditional Church denominations were also initially reluctant to speak against slavery, more recently the mainline Churches were painfully slow in that even the biggest Churches still appear reluctant to see women in significant leadership roles. Today they continue to say little about the arms trade. Peace makers may be blessed in the sermon on the Mount, but they have not always been visible as part of Church leadership in some of the nastier conflicts. An army chaplain, blessing the mission to drop an atomic bomb on a Japanese city, may not represent one of the Church’s finer moments. In this country, despite the record growing gap between the rich and the poor, the Church response has been reactive rather than proactive and, if anything, muted and restrained.
Individually however we do see within our Churches a small number of determined brave individuals anxious to move forward even without official backing, prepared to follow where their conscience leads. Since we should never forget that in the last analysis the Church is us, we can and should be inspired that we have amongst us those unafraid to question government policy, those prepared to speak up for refugees and minorities, those unafraid to work with the gangs, the addicts and the homeless. We continue to be inspired by those prepared to volunteer in disaster zones, those who insist on supporting Christian World service and those of our Church folk prepared to go into War zones as aid workers.
When we look at the way Jesus interacted with those he met, we notice he continually pushed them to take personal responsibility. It is also my impression he tended not to insist those healed that God had done it for them. Instead, he acknowledged their personal faith, or actions in seeking his help. It was as if he represented a non-brokered faith … a faith in which the shouldering of a personal cross is the test of an individual response.
The seed analogy is vivid and helpful. A seed still attached to the parent plant can only whither and decay. The seed freed to germinate and take root can give rise to new life. Certainly, the parent plant – in our case even the parent Church has an essential part of our life cycle. Yet even there the parent Church should be continually allowing and even encouraging the seed to break free to give rise to genuine new life.
Jesus talks of the confrontation as one he in particular must face for himself. He sees the paradox of finding life through death, release through suffering, in effect as the dawn after the night. Some of the terminology he uses strongly suggests his premonition of the dark despair he is understood to have faced in the garden of Gethsemane. As always with John it is hard to disentangle the theology from the factual record.
Some of the allusions are easy to grasp. When Jesus talks of he (and she?!) who loves his (or her?!) life will lose it Jesus is not of course talking of a sense of the worth of life – but rather the attractions of a shallow pursuit of that which comes easy… yet there is still mystery. The notion of hating your life to win eternal life is a difficult thought-provoking paradox and perhaps related to the historical fact that by the death of the martyrs the Church itself apparently grew. Yet in what sense the life continues is much harder to put into words. Modern cosmology has in effect put paid to notions of heaven being up there and hell down there as places, and the certainty with which some describe the hereafter (particularly at funerals) is hard to justify since many of the descriptions are contradictory and mutually exclusive.
What we can however be sure of is that a sense of what Jesus stood for has continued to have a lasting significance and regardless of the manner of his execution his message and the Spirit of what he stood for lives on, but not in the ether. Rather it is in the responses and deeds of those who win the right to be called followers by how they respond to the way of Jesus. Will that include those like us?
By contrast perhaps we might finish with an historical anecdote.
There are several versions of the story about the King Xerxes about to invade Greece. One version says that before they crossed the Hellespont River, he had his mighty Persian army drawn up so that he might review them. He smiled in great satisfaction at their magnificence – then his officers noticed suddenly he had tears in his eyes. “What troubles you?” the officer asked.
“I was just thinking that, in one hundred years, not a single one of these fine soldiers will be alive. Nothing will remain”.
Xerxes’ words might remind us that each of us have a relatively brief time in which we can respond to the gospel. And don’t forget that when it comes to following Christ, each generation needs to ensure the mission is handed on to the next generation. We can’t depend on what previous disciples did in the past. We can’t glory only in the deeds of previous generation of Christians. Newcomers or “old-hands”, the test is always the challenge of living the faith.
The essence of Christianity was not necessarily finished when Jesus was lifted-up on his cross. It continues to live amongst those we encounter………. if we make it live, but finding meaning in his message about our own seed is the chapter that we will have to write for ourselves.
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