By: The Rev. Libbie Weber
Interesting how this story about the Greeks at the Passover festival goes down, so to speak. They tell Philip that they ‘…wish to see Jesus’. Philip doesn’t immediately go to Jesus, which it seems he would have been able to do. He first seeks out, however, Andrew, Peter’s brother and fellow apostle, also from Bethsaida in Galilee. Perhaps he wanted to consult with Andrew about the propriety of this. Perhaps it had to do with a differing level of cultural sophistication between these Greeks and the more humble disciples from Galilee. Together Philip and Andrew go to Jesus with the Greeks’ request. His answer at first seems to affirm that the Greeks should see him: The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Sure, bring the Greeks to see me! But then, with the next part of Jesus’s response, Philip and Andrew must have been rather mystified:
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. This sounds much more like a disappearance – and an unavailability to sight, let alone conversation. Jesus continues on by speaking about death, albeit in a tell-it-slant kind of way: Those who love their life lose it… What must his two apostles have thought by this point in Jesus’s answer to them? What kind of response would they be giving to the Greeks? Did Jesus want to make sure that the Greeks realized this was not to be a cult of fame and political triumph? His own apostles and disciples had not even wholly grasped this by this point. What an important moment, however, and answer! On the surface it seems that Jesus is side-stepping the importance of life. He has the audacity to put death first. But this is not a ‘culture of death’ He’s advocating. It’s much deeper than that: it’s eternal life. It’s the life we seek beyond an idolatry of earthly life on our own terms.
It’s back to the territory of Annie Dillard’s modern-day question (2nd Sunday in Lent, above): ‘Do you think you will keep your life, or anything else you love?’ We try to hold onto life, prolonging it sometimes beyond what is right and true and good, with medical apparatus. We place the life of the mother and the father, their personal preferences, their choice of how they think they should live their lives, above the life of their child, growing within the mother’s womb. We attempt to define what a good and valid life is and then look down on those who are disabled in any number of ways. It is entirely possible to hold life itself as an idol, a false god… and forget true Life, the life that is hidden in the ground, a dying seed that then produces lavish life in its dying. True Life: our Savior Christ dying for our sins on the cross, and then breaking those bonds of death in resurrection, ushering in abundant Life, truly and blessedly paradoxical. In Christ’s crucifixion, he will draw all people to himself, to Life itself, compelling them to make the decision for small life or real Life. This is what Jesus wants the Greeks to see – and Philip and Andrew: ‘…without minimizing the tragedy of death, Christ has opened up a way of seeing a deeper mystery in death and has transformed death throughout all time: for what was once the end, now becomes the beginning of a deeper mystery’. (6) (5) See Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant’ — http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/247292 and also Eugene Peterson’s book Tell It Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008). (6) John Behr, Becoming Human (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2013), p. 48