The passage is a long rambling theological
treatise which will not have meant much to the Greeks who want to meet Jesus
and came from a different religion, a different culture. Israel was
multicultural. Romans, Greeks, Samaritans, Syrophoenicians, Jews.
Jesus does not address the staggering
question that Philip and Andrew put to him. There are Greeks who want to meet
him. There are North Koreans who want to meet Jesus! Its that stark. Of course
2000 years later we understand that the message of Jesus is for everyone, not
just for me and my Jewish friends, not just for me and my English white
friends, not just for African Carribbeans, not just for the Church but for
Indians, Pakistanis, Iraqis, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Russians. The message of Jesus
Christ is for everyone. And Jeremiah reminds us that Gods Spirit will live
within us.
Philip was Greek and went on in the book of
Acts to spread the gospel to an Ethiopian. Jesus reminds them that he is going
to die and in his death draw everyone together, as we in the church should be
together in Christ. This is again about cross bearing discipleship. Jesus is
human and he doesn’t want to suffer. He wants this cup of suffering taken from
him. Like at Jesus baptism a voice is heard from heaven. We have a choice we
can choose evil or we can choose light and the good life. The crowd of Jews
knows that the Messiah will be immortal so they start questioning Jesus instead
of accepting what he is saying. He warns them that the time is short to choose.
For all of us the time is short but we will waste time arguing, semantics, nit
picking. Jesus at this point withdraws. It is enough. And he reemerges on the
donkey procession into Jerusalem that we remember on Palm Sunday.
There is only one way to be a Christian and
that is through humility and repentance, to accept that in ways we cannot
always understand that Jesus, a very good man, Gods Son, was brutally murdered
and goes before us to open up the pathway to God. This is the gospel. We come
to the end of ourself and we hang there with Jesus, and die, to be reborn by
Gods Spirit.
Today the message that Jesus Christ is for
everyone is apparent here today but in many churches groups of people huddle
together, cossetting their Christian faith in empty, crumbling buildings. This
is not the Gospel. Jesus came to show us another way. It is for everyone, for
asylum seekers, for prisoners, for drug users, prostitutes, tax inspectors,
unmarried mothers, students, the unemployed, the disabled, alcoholics, for the
divorced, the elderly. For all of us. Start following this man and put your
life in order. This is the message we need to share.
