Jeremiah 31.31-34: God makes a new covenant with the people of Israel.
Hebrews 5.5-15: Jesus is described to the Hebrews as being like a High Priest, the source of life for all who believe.
John 12.20-33: Some Greeks want to speak to Jesus, who responds to this news by predicting his own death.
The obvious question1 in this week’s gospel is: what’s the point of telling us about the Greeks? They seem to have no role in the story, and we never even find out whether they get to speak with Jesus – they’re really just a narrative loose end which triggers Jesus to talk about his own death. There seems to be a narrative hiccup here.
Then we have Paul telling the Hebrews that Jesus is a new High Priest – interceding for the people, taking on the role of making sacrifice for sin, gently guiding. But Jesus as High Priest – a concept which Paul’s Jewish audience would be familiar with even as they struggle to reconcile their old faith with the new – is different to their expectations. This is not a human High Priest with flaws and failings, but one both human and divine – those two natures undivided in the person of Jesus – and universal. Jesus is the source of life for all who believe him. And Jesus intercedes for the people not with ritual or formula2, but with his own weeping, lamenting and mourning the sins and the suffering of the humanity with whom he has inextricably embedded himself in the incarnation.
Lament is something the prophet Jeremiah knows too – in fact, he spends the majority of the thirty-odd chapters preceding this week’s reading lamenting the plight and the behaviour of the people of Israel. Grieving the darkness of the situation in which the Israelites find themselves3, he turns suddenly to hope: God’s promise of a new covenant with the disenfranchised people, a promise that everyone will know God, that every sin will be forgiven. Does this moment in scripture represent a people re-imagining God, learning once again that God will respond with compassion and not wrath to human sin? Is this Israel reminding itself that God is not an oppressor but a God who loves, and loves, and loves?
Jesus responds to some Greeks by predicting his own death, which is odd – but maybe not actually that odd, in the context of everything else going on. Throughout his life, Jesus loves recklessly and with disregard for the consequences – and that love is for all people, not just the people of Israel. It’s a love that encompasses outsiders, that encompasses worlds passed away and worlds not yet born. It’s a love that encompasses us here in the twenty-first century, in the midst of a global pandemic. It’s a love that challenges the powerful – a love that sends Jesus straight to the cross. And on the cross, the Son of Humanity draws all people to himself. No wonder Jesus is troubled in spirit – the task he faces is literally impossible for anyone who wants to keep his own life. But not impossible for Jesus: he just keeps on loving, and then pays for it.
As we move towards Holy Week4, we look towards the coming horror of the cross, a public and brutal execution of the man whose love and refusal to play by the rules challenges the Powers That Be. In Lent, we turn inwards and outwards, facing our own darkness and the darkness of the world. In that, we are called to do as Jesus did: to love abundantly and universally, knowing that all of creation exists in and through the God who created it and grieves for it and takes joy in it and loves it, and who relies on us to be God’s love in and through it all.
God’s incarnation in the world shows us the absolute vulnerability of love: love has no defence in the world except for its own self. But5 the resurrection shows us something else. Love might be defenceless, but ultimately, it is subject to no force other than itself. And the God of love, the very Source of love, loves us, and wants nothing more than for us to be a part of that.
1 Well, an obvious question. Maybe there are others which are more obvious. Or maybe it’s not obvious and the blogger is just over-thinking.
2 Beautiful and meaningful though that must be – God of course is present in the liturgy and ritual of all the faith traditions, present in all of our beautiful, haltering, imperfect and faithful attempts to draw nearer to the Divine Presence.
3 The Babylonian exile.
4 Which is just around the corner – which is terrifying when we think about the amount of music we still have to learn in really very few rehearsals. We are not panicking. Yet.
5 Spoiler alert.
Photo by zan douglas on Unsplash
Christ Church Cathedral Choir 