Voices from heaven are rare even in the gospels. We are used to hearing them at two moments in Matthew, Mark, and Luke: at the baptism of Jesus and at the moment of the transfiguration. “This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased,” says God when Jesus is baptized. “This is my beloved Son, listen to him,” God says at the transfiguration. But John’s gospel gives us neither moment directly. The only time a voice comes from heaven in John’s gospel is in the passage we hear this morning. Jesus is contemplating his crucifixion, and he prays the words “Father, glorify your name.” And then—only then—a voice comes from heaven saying “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.”
Everything in John’s gospel is a little bit strange, isn’t it? It feels familiar after Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but at key moments like the baptism of Jesus we realize that something different is happening, something we know we ought to pay attention to. This is the Jesus we’ve seen before, but we are seeing him again in John’s gospel, with a twist.
In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, when Jesus contemplates his crucifixion he struggles in prayer to accept the will of God. “Let this cup pass from me,” he asks, but then he concludes “Let thy will be done.” We see this act of self-surrender and we know that it is not what Jesus wants, except insofar as he is able to unite himself with the will of the one he calls his father.
John’s gospel is strikingly different, as we hear this morning: “Now my soul is troubled,” he says. “And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” It’s as though John’s Jesus had read the other gospels and was letting us know that we would not be getting that moment in this one. He is not going to ask that the cup pass from him. His soul is troubled, but there is something larger happening here for him. He makes a point of letting us know that he knows that we expect him not to want the crucifixion, and then he tells us that his whole sense of mission, his whole reason for being if we can speak of it that way, is for “this hour,” for the death, resurrection, and ascension that will draw all people to him and drive out the ruler of this world.
For many of us this is a more cosmic Jesus and he’s difficult to warm up to. Who contemplates crucifixion without asking to be spared? He doesn’t sound like a human being. He sounds like The Logos, the Word of God who has been present with God from the beginning and who might scare us a little or a lot. But listen, if that’s all we find in the gospel of John we are missing out on a lot. This is the Jesus who weeps for Lazarus before raising him from the dead. This is our good shepherd. If we hear only the lofty cosmic Jesus here we are missing the full flesh-and-blood significance of this moment for him.
Jesus knows that this hour is his fulfillment, and he desires fulfillment. He wants to be lifted up and to draw us to him. He longs to glorify the name of God. This is his passion in every sense of the word. He is not declaring some inhuman strength here, or denying human pain. His soul is troubled but it’s good trouble, the original good trouble if we can borrow the words of John Lewis. This Jesus knows that he is with God in the beginning, that through him all things are made, and that his life is for us and with us, in living and dying and in bringing us with him to an eternal life that includes right now. If we see Jesus as “cosmic” here, but “cosmic” doesn’t mean “drenched in love, drowning in oneness with God and all of humanity,” if this Word of God isn’t a word of passion, if he is just an example of bloodless superhuman strength, then all the events of Holy Week that we are about to experience are abstract exercises, dusty symbols that don’t connect to us.
We need to understand that Jesus is re-routing the whole stream of desire here, away from self-gratification in the most basic sense, and toward the jubilant, triumphant, excessive love of God. His whole sense of purpose is for this hour. He is not losing his life at this moment. He is finding his life. And he’s finding ours too. Jesus lives, dies, rises, and ascends to turn our hearts inside out, to teach us that our real life is in God. Jesus lives, dies, rises, and ascends to tell us that our joy will be complete when we know what any grain of wheat knows, that it is better not to withhold ourselves. It is better to be part of a rich harvest. Not to crucify desire but to desire the will of God, even in crucifixion. Not for the sake of suffering but for the sake of living. Honestly, it’s better to be human and to let God lift us up as we fall. Not to shun our humanity by denying suffering and death and love.
I don’t think it has ever felt more urgent to me to be with Jesus in his hour of self-giving, and to know that he gives himself in joy, with desire. Eight people were killed in Atlanta this week, and though it’s preposterous to imagine that we can explain the confessed killer’s actions, we have heard a narrative about what he did that is all too familiar. We have heard about Asian women whose economic opportunities are narrowed down to exploitation and danger. We have heard about a form of desire that traffics in racial difference and racial dominance. We have heard that this was a Christian desire: furtive, impure, disgraced, stigmatizing, exploitive, compulsive, and ultimately violent in its drive to purify the self from longing and need. This seems plausible to us, somehow, as a story about contemporary Christian life. We can all denounce that story—the confessed killer’s church has denounced that story—but we know it in a thousand versions and it is stone cold real all around us. And it bears the unmistakable stamp of the contemporary church.
This is a desire that sacrifices another in order to raise up the self. We will recreate it until we know what any grain of wheat knows, that it is better to fall. We will dominate until we learn why we are here. Not to exalt ourselves our pull our lives together into something we can glorify. Not to struggle to make ourselves feel pure. Not to sacrifice others in the name of making ourselves acceptable to ourselves. We are not here to imitate a bloodless superhero we call Jesus, who is miles above humanity and wants us to be, too.
No, we are here to learn how to desire what God has actually made us to be. Like Jesus. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the voice from heaven speaks when we see who Jesus really is, at the moments of his baptism and his transfiguration. In John’s gospel the great revelation is that Jesus desires to be what God has made him to be. He desires a love that grasps at nothing and thus knows no frustration or limitation. He desires us.
This Lent, it may be true that nothing is more important that the desire Jesus has to be one with us and one with the Father. In suffering and death he is lifted up and he draws us in. Where he goes we must also go.
Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
March 21, 2021
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia