Fifth Sunday in Lent

Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51:1-13; Hebrews 5:5-10; John 12:20-33

There’s a part of our Christian tradition that is really uncomfortable with the idea that Jesus suffered like we do.  We don’t want him to have been angry, or afraid, or passionate about anything or anyone except God.  But today we hear from two very different sources that Jesus was indeed human and suffered as we do.  Jesus’ “perfection” is not about being without temptation, but about becoming complete and whole.  He became perfect through suffering, through listening to God throughout the suffering and not escaping his fate.  Even in John’s Gospel, where Jesus so often sounds superhuman, he is reported to be disturbed in his soul.  But his completion comes when he doesn’t evade the realities of human life.  He doesn’t ask to be exempt from our fate.  He stands firm.  

It is Jesus’ desire to glorify God that gives him the strength to endure.  He knows that glorifying God doesn’t mean only the good parts - the baptism, the voice, the mountaintop moments.  Glorifying God means doing the things we don’t want to do but know we must, knowing that it is Christ in us who is at work.

Jesus continues to turn our values upside down.  People come to see him, to honor him, and he tells them that he - and they - have to let go of their lives.  Serving Jesus means following, and that means going where he is going.  It doesn’t mean putting on a brave face, or being so out of touch with our feelings that we lose our humanity.  It means going anyway, even though we’re afraid, because we believe the promise.

The promise is not that we won’t be touched by life, or by death.  The promise is bigger than that.  The promise is that we will know God in our hearts and our lives; we will know that nothing can separate us from the love of God.  

I know this promise is true.  I know I’ve only begun the dying that leads to fullness of life, eternal life; but I’ve done enough to know the promise is true.  Through surrender to life as it is, through endurance, through trust, I’m enabled to take actions that I never would have before, and to experience joys that I can only reach by those actions.

The days are surely coming, says our God, when you will know this promise too.