Abstract
A friend of mine, another minister, who is a superb photographer, recently went on holiday to Italy, to Salerno and the Amalfi coastline.
He sent back a picture of a crucifix from the Church of the Crucifix. It is quite unique, as well as being stunningly beautiful. It is painted wood, from the 13th century, and shows Christ, not as a figure set in relief against a wooden cross, but as part of the cross, painted into the surface of the wood. The Jesus depicted doesn’t have proper limbs, just the pierced feet, hands and side. The cross comes with its own weeping figures, mourners, also painted onto the wood. In other words, the whole story is there, not just a part of it: Christ and the mixed emotions and reactions of those who had followed him. He does not die in isolation, but surrounded by those who do not know what to make of it, or where to place their hopes and sorrows. The delicacy of the painting completely subverts all the ugliness, bitterness and horror of the crucifixion – it reminds us that something beautiful came from such an extravagance of sorrow.
But we can only go there, only reach that part of the story, by looking at the interpretation the artist and maker has added to the wooden cross, and that is often the case with our faith. We sometimes forget that we are not looking solely for the history of what happened, but for the spirit and essence of the gift, the beauty behind the extravagance of grace.
It is so with this passage from John’s Gospel. On the surface, it seems like another of these predictive passages where Jesus talks about his death in advance of the facts, as he does sometimes in other Gospels. Instead, it is like the painted figures on the cross, a view of Jesus that can only be given when we already have the whole picture in mind, with hindsight, on those historical facts of crucifixion and the impact of crucifixion.
When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to me.
Another surprising element is the request of the Greeks, although this is most likely to be Greek –speaking Jews from other parts of the Roman Empire. However, for us, the hearers of this story, they represent the whole world: the same world that God loved so much as to give his son; the same world that the Pharisees noted was following Jesus. The Pharisees, try as they might to counter the Jesus effect, were unable to prevent his miraculous signs from becoming common knowledge and creating interest among the crowd.
‘look the whole world is following him’, they said, ‘we are not succeeding at all.’
Yet this is the same world that Jesus ultimately rejects for his followers. If you make your own existence in this world the focus of your life, how can you retain that? Only if you give your life, only if it is added to, part of, a greater whole, can you hope to defeat this world and all its tendencies to brokenness and failure. Only a life which is freely offered can counter the dark, seductive power of the world we share.
a grain of wheat remains no more than a single grain unless it is dropped into the ground and dies.
This makes uncomfortable reading for us. It makes uncomfortable reading because the very idea of martyrdom is out of place in our multi-faith, tolerant world – at least for our part of it. We no longer find it acceptable to inject that level of passion into our faith. We would much prefer to recognise other faiths, to make attempts to get along together, to live in the complex of shared values, anything other than this is too extreme, too uncontrollable. And if we hear, as we have done lately in Syria and Iraq, of acts of cruelty related to extreme faith, we find that repugnant, excessive. The temperature of our faith, the one we teach our children, the one we live by, is tepid, reflecting the fine balance of our liberal, centrist politics, our commitment to equal rights. Even within the churches, especially within the churches, we have bought into the idea that religion, passionate religion, is a dangerous material which has to be carefully handled. Whether that is strictly speaking true, is quite questionable, because we so often attribute to religion, and solely to religion, divisions which include political and perhaps ethnic alliances. Religion is often part of a more complex mix.
So what does it mean, in our context and time, to be a grain of wheat which falls to the earth and dies? We understand, in part, that we live in communion, in community, in Christ. We do not live in isolation, but surrounded by those who are as invested, as hopeful, as we are, in the communion, the community, we share. We do not remain a single grain, we flourish in the fields of wheat, and to allow those to flower and ripen we sometimes have to set aside our insistent self. That, we know, is part of sacrificial living. It is hardly the first time we have heard of this, or the first time it has been brought to our notice. And we have also known, similarly, that this is counter-cultural, that the world does not live like this.
We have moved it seems from a culture of life-long service to one of entitlement. This sentence sounds like a criticism, or even a look back with rose coloured spectacles. It is, in fact, neither. Believing in that culture of service doesn’t make it any easier for any Christian to accept, to live by, and speaking for myself, I like the culture of entitlement, who doesn’t? With the latter, you can buy what you want, go where you want, when you want. You are important in your own right, no longer expected to subsume yourself into a greater good. It is very attractive to feel that your money is yours, your time is yours, your decisions are yours. Whether such is the best kind of life for the community of Christ is another matter.
I was reading an article recently about the medieval monasteries of Kosovo, Serbian Orthodox mostly, and protected as much by the Ottoman Sultans as by the Orthodox Bishops. They were extremely difficult to get to, over mountain trails and steep, steep gorges, and inside, on every inch of column, wall, ceiling, they were covered with painted frescoes and inlaid with the gold that represents heaven and eternity within the heavenly community. Even now, they are hard to reach. Eight hundred years ago, when they called the craftsmen from Dalmatia, the artists, to come and decorate the interiors, the places were even more physically challenging to access, and it was equally hard to create the masterpieces of biblical storytelling that flood the church with colour and hope.
‘When I am lifted up from the earth,’ Jesus said, ‘I will draw everyone to me’. There has to be a collective element to what we do as the community of Christ, to the picture we paint of life together which puts Jesus Christ above us and over us. There has to be an extravagance in living, which draws others by its very discipline and difficulty. It is time we began to think about our world again, and Christ and his community outside and within it, and that essence of shared living and responsibility which is our only entitlement