Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
The Fifth Sunday of Lent, 13^th of March, 2024

Hebrews 5:5-10
John 12:20-33

‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus.’ Today’s gospel reading begins with people who are strangers in a foreign land. These are the final days of Jesus’ public ministry and Jesus and his disciples are in Jerusalem, the centre of the Jewish world. Immediately before today’s story, John tells us that the Pharisees were declaring that ‘the world has gone after him!’ (John 12:19) and what the Pharisees probably mean by ‘the world’ were all the people in Jerusalem for the Passover. But the Pharisees are more right than they know. The world is seeking Jesus, and so the next people to approach him are Greek.

These Greeks were not coming from a great empire, from the glory that was Greece. Rome had replaced Greece as the world’s great political power and Greece was in decline, long past the time of great minds like Plato and Socrates. Even if Greece had still been great, these people are in Jerusalem, not Greece. They are out of place, sojourners, foreigners, not from Palestine or its surrounding areas. They are Gentiles, not Jews. If the Pharisees were annoyed at Jews seeking Jesus out, how much more annoyed must they have been at the approach of Gentiles.

Probably because they are Gentiles the Greeks do not approach Jesus directly. Their approach is mediated by Philip and Andrew from the Gentile-oriented territory of Bethsaida. They approach Jesus’ followers humbly, addressing these Galileans not as fellow worshipers or as equals but as lords, using the Greek word kyrios that we use as a title for Jesus.  ‘Lord,’ they implore Philip in words that we could use ourselves, ‘we wish to see Jesus.’

We are not told whether their wish is fulfilled, only that Phillip and Andrew approach Jesus. Perhaps the Greeks are not yet able speak to Jesus because it will only be later, on the cross, when he is lifted up from the earth, that he will draw all people to himself. What we are told is that Jesus responds to this approach by speaking of his death. The Gospel according to John does not contain a scene in the Garden of Gethsemane, in which Jesus prays for the cup to be taken away from him, and then accepts that his Father’s will is to be done. Instead, Jesus talks about that here and now, in public. He does not ask ‘Father, save me from this hour,’ because it is for this hour that he has come, to glorify his Father through his death. As we know, in the Gospel according to John death and glory are the same thing; Jesus’ crucifixion is also his glorification; when he is lifted up on the cross he is already beginning to ascend into heaven. But this connection of glorification with suffering does not make the suffering itself any less. Jesus’ soul is still troubled.

‘Lord, we wish to see Jesus’. Saints and mystics see Jesus face to face, the rest of us can only see him in a mirror, dimly. This week I ran a Retreat for two candidates for ministry who will today be ordained at the Church of All Nations, so I have been reflecting on the ‘Charge’ that ordinands receive and the vows they make. Ordinands are charged to ‘receive the witness to Christ in the holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, and to proclaim from them the gospel of Jesus Christ in word and deed’. It is primarily through the holy Scriptures that we encounter Jesus, they are the mirror in which we can catch glimpses of him, and we can only do so through faith. Without faith, the Old and New Testaments are simply historic documents of limited value. With faith, the witness to Christ given to us in the Scriptures enables us to encounter him.

That does not mean that the Scriptural witness to Christ is always easy to understand. We saw that last week when Jesus compared his crucifixion and glorification to Moses lifting up the serpent in the wilderness. We see it this week in Jesus’ equally difficult words: ‘Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.’ These are profoundly difficult words to comprehend. Why did Jesus have to die to demonstrate God’s love? What does it mean for us as his followers to hate our life in this world? Theologians and biblical commentators spend their lives exploring such questions. This week’s readings also give us a smaller puzzle to ponder. Who was Melchizedek and why does the Letter to the Hebrews describe Jesus as a high priest according to his order?

The commentators I read this week were very clear: do not spend time explaining who Melchizedek is, it will bring your Reflection to a grinding halt. But you know me well enough to know that I cannot resist weird historical diversions in Bible readings. I must remind us all who Melchizedek was. He has a walk-on part in the story of Abraham, where he is identified as the king of Salem, probably the area that later became Jerusalem, and as a priest of El Elyon, God Most High. He blesses Abraham with the words, ‘Blessed be Abram by God Most High, maker of heaven and earth; and blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your hand!’ Abraham then gives him one tenth of all the plunder Abraham has just acquired while rescuing his nephew Lot from those who had abducted him. (Genesis 14) In one of the enthronement psalms addressed to the coming Messiah the psalmist writes that ‘The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind, “You are a priest for ever according to the order of Melchizedek.”’ (Psalm 110:4) This is what today’s passage from the Letter to the Hebrews is quoting. The reference to Melchizedek seems to have been because in the Hebrew Scriptures he is a priest without human credentials, appearing long before the Levites were appointed as priests under Moses. (Numbers 1:50) He was also a priest to whom Abraham, the ancestor of the people of Israel, paid a tithe. If Jesus was ‘designated by God a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek,’ the author of the Letter to the Hebrews seems to be arguing, then he is high priest in an order superior to that to which the Jewish high priest belonged.[1]

The point the author of the Letter to the Hebrews is making is that God has appointed Jesus as the only necessary high priest, the one who can mediate perfectly between God and humanity because he is both human and divine. The sacrifices offered by the Jewish priesthood for the people are no longer necessary. The one necessary and perfect sacrifice has been offered up by the one necessary and perfect high priest. As always, we need to be careful when speaking about such things that we do not fall into Christian Supersessionism, the idea that the church has replaced Israel. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews is encouraging Jewish Christians who were being persecuted for their faith in Jesus to persevere. Like so much of the New Testament, we are seeing an intra-Jewish debate that we need to be careful not to turn into theological antisemitism in our very different context.

We also need to be careful about arguments that God needed a sacrifice to be made to forgive human sin. Such arguments turn God into a blood-thirsty monster who demands the death of his beloved Son before he deigns to forgive us. I said earlier that the question of why Jesus needs to die to demonstrate God’s love is one that theologians ponder all their lives. It does not have a simple answer. But one of the things the crucifixion does is answer arguments that violence and human suffering are necessary for religious, political, and social order, because Jesus is the innocent victim whose death undermines all such justifications. When Jesus declares that ‘Now is the judgement of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out,’ and tells us that ‘those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life,’ the world to which he refers is everything that puts him on the cross.

‘Lord, we wish to see Jesus’. When today’s reading from the Letter to the Hebrews talks about Jesus offering something up, though, it is not his life or his death. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews says that Jesus ‘offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears’. The high priest, the mediator between God and humanity, the one who offers prayers and sacrifice to God on humanity’s behalf, brings to God the grief of the world. We often look at a world ruled by violence and feel anguish and isolation and pain and anger. In today’s reading we are shown God in Jesus grieving the world’s violence with the same passion that we feel when we are confronted by it.

So often when we are confronted by the world’s evil we cry out, ‘Where is God?’ The God who was lifted up on the cross experienced the same pain felt by the victims of evil. The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that in Jesus God also protests the evil of the world with loud cries and tears. When we cry out in angry repudiation, we are doing that with Jesus. The Greeks told Phillip that they wished to see Jesus; we see Jesus in all the victims of the world’s violence, in all those who challenge the evils of the world, and in all those who mourn them. If, like the Greeks, we wish to see Jesus, that is where we need to look.

The Prophet Jeremiah told the people of Israel that the day would come when, ‘No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord”, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.’ For us Christians that day came with the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. At our ordination ministers are charged to ‘proclaim from them the gospel of Jesus Christ in word and deed’. Every member of the church has that same calling. If the distinction between the world as God intends it to be and the world as it now is means that we must sometimes make our proclamation of the gospel ‘with loud cries and tears,’ we can do so knowing that Jesus is crying with us, and that the day will surely come when the Lord will wipe away every tear from our eyes. Amen.

[1] If you want to see the author of the Letter to the Hebrews make this exact argument, read Hebrews 7.