By The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven, Sabbatical Priest“The hour has come.” May I speak in the name of the Living God who holds all our times in Her hand. Amen.
The last sand is falling through the hour glass. Two Greeks have come to see Jesus in the gospel this morning (showing us that the world beyond Israel is being drawn in) but the time of public preaching and teaching is over. There is no more time for parables that confuse, console and give cause to ponder. No time for miracles and healings to woo and win people to a deeper awareness that something eternal, something transformative and life giving, something of God is breaking in here. There is finally, after all he’s done and tried to do, no more time.
“The hour has come from the Son of Man to be glorified.” Over and over in John’s gospel we have heard the phrase: my hour has not yet come. And now, at last, it has. We know something about this in our own lives. Our daughter is a high school senior. The college acceptance letters have arrived. By fall for her—not to mention her brother, dad and me—the hour will have come.
A seminary classmate described waking up one morning after 10 years of infertility treatment to the quiet conviction: It is enough. “I never looked back,” she said. She’s now the mother of two adopted children. Her hour had come. Sometimes we seem to have a choice and sometimes we’re dragged kicking and screaming to the brink of a new world.
The hour has come for Jesus too. “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit,” (v. 24).” He is talking about himself. In a few days the events of holy week will unfold. Jesus will die on a cross. He could have avoided it—could have headed for the hills, could have called on his disciples, called on the crowd itching for a king, called on angels to save him. But he didn’t. Jesus came not to be saved but to save. He saw a purpose in his dying that was worth the cost. “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.”
He will let the full weight of our fear, envy, political expedience and sin fall on him. Not in weakness but in power. Not to glorify victimization but to stand by choice with those who have no choice—the victims of domestic violence, rape and child abuse, the victims of poisoned wells, burned huts and bodily degradation in Darfur, the victims of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, of flooding in North Dakota and Minnesota, of economic chaos. I could go on.
This is what God is about. This is what God calls us to. “Whoever serves me must follow me.” It’s what he’s been saying all along. “Love one another as I have loved you.” “Greater love has no one than this than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” “I am among you as one who serves.” No wonder the disciples fled on Good Friday. All of us—if we’re honest— hear our mother’s calling about now. Love to Lord, can’t, gotta go!
God is intimately connected to the suffering of the world. It’s a very maternal image. The great preacher Jim Forbes said God was like his mother calling at dinner time: Are all the children in? Nobody is forgotten. No one is outside the arena of God’s concern and care. It’s a lovely image of God this Women’s History Month. This is no impassible, unmovable God, untouched by human suffering. In the cross God takes the pain of the world and writes it on the palms of his outstretched hands. God loves God’s children enough to die for them—what mother can’t understand that? Or father either.
The suffering cry out in pain but the cry comes first from God. We are such sensitive beings made in the divine image—imagine the exquisite sensitivity that must be God’s! We are sensitive to suffering and we are created in the image of God. Imagine the exquisite sensitivity that must be God's! We yearn to love and be loved, to see and be seen, imagine the yearning relatedness in the heart of God! God loves us, wants to be in relationship with us, overturning all our expectations, overthrowing all that gets in the way.
“The glory of God is a human being who is fully alive,” wrote Irenaeus, in the 2nd century. What does it mean to be fully alive? It means to know you matter to God and to the world, to be connected to God and to others in a way life-giving, life changing and free. The divine love will sacrifice whatever is necessary to clothe our nakedness with dignity, to awaken us to the immensity of our worth in God’s eyes, to a love than which nothing greater can be conceived, a love that will cast down the mighty from their thrones and lift up the lowly, a love that will make the first last and the last first, that will make us fully human, fully alive at last whatever the cost. Fear not! “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.” Now. Now. Now. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth will draw all peoples to myself.”
The cross has been used to glorify victimhood—especially in women. It’s been used to oppress and control. My friend from seminary had an alcoholic father who used to beat her mother, break up the furniture and come after them. “He’s going to kill us!” she’d scream at her mother, “Why don’t you get us out of here?” and her mother would reply that it was her cross to bear. No. No. No. No. No. This is a criminal distortion that grieves the heart of God. The goal of the cross is not victimhood and suffering—the goal is salvation and joy—human beings fully human, fully alive. To say otherwise is like saying the goal of pregnancy is labor and delivery instead of the baby. Labor and delivery may well be involved but the goal, in both, is new life. Now. Now. Now.
If women are in the image of God, as Genesis tells us, then women’s experience is part of God’s experience and has its truth to tell. Women’s experience doesn’t separate power and compassion. Women’s lived experience involves openness to the ones loved, a vulnerability to their experience and solidarity with their well being. Women give birth—in pain and in power—in love, undivided. We sacrifice our lives, time, money and no small amount of sanity to bring others to autonomy and fullness. Women’s power brings forth and stirs up. It fosters life in all its dimensions in a movement of spirit that builds, mends, struggles with and against, celebrates and laments. It is the power of love to transform and connect that changes people and changes the world by entering into suffering, entering into the crucified history of the world with healing and liberating power.
Women with children at the breast, at the knee, at the door heading out into the world know the immediacy of love, the urgency of NOW. God is connecting with us NOW through Jesus Christ. “The whole world has gone after him,” said the religious leaders after Palm Sunday in dismay. Little did they know! How will Jesus transcend the boundaries of time and space? How will he make the leap from 1st century Palestine to 21st century America? He will do it by being lifted up. The cross lifts Jesus beyond the boundaries of life and death, time and space: he is utterly unbound. “And I when I am lifted up from the earth will draw all peoples to myself.” He is the grain whose planting has birthed such fruit.
We’re called to do something with our life—as Jesus did with his. “Those who want to serve me must follow me.” We’re called to die, to give ourselves to God and one another sacrificially, in ways that make a difference, in ways that bring life. If you want to know if your suffering is of God ask yourself: does this bring LIFE. Becoming fully alive is not pain free but it is life giving. So many people are looking for faith, for spiritual fulfillment, but aren’t finding it. Maybe they, maybe we, are looking at it the wrong way. We’re looking to gain something we think we don’t have. Maybe we should be looking to lose something that’s already ours—things we “hate” to use Jesus’ phrase, that keep us from the love, mercy and healing of God in Christ, that keep us from trusting in the One who loves us enough to die for us and rise again. What on earth can compare to what’s to be gained in Jesus Christ? The hour has come my friends. What have we got to lose?
© 2009 The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven
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