We pray and we worship these ideas and events through
Fifth Sunday in Lent: 29th March, 2009
Fr John Davis, Vicar of St Peter's, Eastern Hill
Today on the fifth Sunday of Lent we move into what has been traditionally termed Passiontide: the last two weeks before the feast of the Resurrection. This is the most solemn and careful time for our final preparations for and our participation in Holy Week and Easter.
"Create a clean heart within me" is the cry of the response to our psalm. "Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain me with a willing spirit". There is hope and expectation here. There is a sense of promise that is able to be fulfilled.
"Jesus", says today's extract from the letter to the Hebrews, has "become the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him". That assertion stands as a clear signpost at the beginning of Passiontide. Know whose way it is we are following. Know what a prize and what an assurance is made available.
"Sir, we wish to see Jesus", is the polite and gentle request from the Greeks who spoke to the disciples Philip and Andrew. It is almost like the beginning of the ministry of Jesus some three years before. This time it is the gentiles coming. And they are not turned away. Indeed their coming is part of the clear indication in John's gospel that the hour has indeed come. Now is the time.
There is more than a hint of sharp and bitter anger in the Pharisees' observation that has led us into today's gospel passage: "Look, the world has gone after him". The Lord has come into Jerusalem ahead of the coming festival to a huge commotion. We are almost at the beginning of that last week of weeks. Yes, in the terms of John's unfolding of the purpose and intention of God, the hour has indeed come. As one commentator puts it: "A strange 'hour' in which every reality will come to signify its opposite: dying is living, losing is winning."
As in all the gospel lessons in the Sundays of Lent, the portion chosen today throws further light on the mysteries that are to come. Resurrection is what we are being prepared for.
The fifth Sunday in Lent then takes us one stage further in our Lenten journey. If the question being asked and answered in the first three Sundays was essentially 'who then is this Jesus', and if the question last week was what is going to happen through him — and the answer was that he was to be lifted up to die on the cross as the loving sign of the healing and saving power of God for a world that God so loves, then today our gospel returns to that theme. In John's gospel, this is the time; this is the culmination of everything that has gone before: 'The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified'. It is going to happen by a direct and complete engagement and confrontation with suffering and evil.
This is all to say that the issues we are required to attempt to grapple with in these Lenten gospels are just about as big as they get. No one can accuse Christianity of seeking to avoid the hard questions. And as we reflected last week, we Christians have for 2,000 years taken over the outward and visible sign of a shameful and brutal form of execution and made that a sign of victory.
But perhaps the clearest image that stays with us from today's gospel is in fact the simplest. That powerful agricultural image of a single grain of wheat doing what we all know a grain of wheat does, if it is in the right conditions. We try to place this in the context of the words and actions of Jesus, and his teaching reminds us that the story of death and resurrection is so much part of the natural order of things.
There has been this development of teaching through the Sundays of Lent to provide each of us who is prepared to hear with a solid theological background to the events of Holy Week and Easter, which we will be following from now on. Together as a community we will follow in the way of the Lord, starting next week with Palm Sunday. And once again we will be invited to make the connection between what happened some 2,000 years ago with what happens in our own lives. Resurrection then means resurrection now. As it was for that first group of disciples, so it is with our lives: life now, life forever. And this is to be accomplished by, this has been accomplished by what we are preparing to observe, to commemorate, to re-live, to re-claim in the two weeks we have ahead of us. We are drawn towards Good Friday and then onwards even further. And this is for everyone. As the Lord says in today's gospel:
And I, when I am lifted up from the earth,
will draw all people to myself.
The promise of the prophecy from the first lesson comes back to us:
I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
Now, will a searcher coming here find a community of fellow searchers? Those who are searching will always also need their Philips and their Andrews, to help and encourage them along. They will need people who themselves already have that joy and willing spirit in their hearts. They will need people who themselves will not be dismissive or ungenerous. Who will themselves be attempting to be living out that covenant relationship of mutuality:
I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
Next Sunday is Palm Sunday. We will walk the procession carrying our palms, as for the entry into the holy city Jerusalem. We will hear the gospel story of the passion of the Lord in all its formal fullness. It is time to have the story told to us again, as a community of faith. This is the story of Jesus' suffering and dying and rising again. This is what Holy Week and Easter are about. We walk this way together. The palm crosses we take home with us will stand as a continuing reminder.
In our tradition we spell the story out through the unfolding liturgies. We pray and we worship these ideas and events through. We take a lot of time and effort because there is actually nothing more important than this — and now it is time for us to take it in again, so it becomes our story too.
What does this say to me? How does this shape how I live and how I might die? How does this help me approach the death of those I love? How do we as a community of faith live this out? How does the re-acceptance of these central truths shape us as a community, in the ways that we live and we love and we serve? These are big and challenging questions. The powerful and awesome answers are clearly offered to us over the next two weeks.
The Lord be with you.
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