Here we are in the fifth Sunday in Lent, nearing the end of Jesus’ ministry time on earth, and this week once again, John introduces us to yet another enigmatic scripture, an encounter involving Jesus and a group of Greeks who were coming to the Passover Festival in Jerusalem and who requested a “colloquium” with Jesus.
Through Philip, they request an assembly with the Messiah. Philip tells Andrew, and together they inform Jesus of the Greeks’ request.
We know that we have some “blind spots” when we read the scriptures. They were written in a time period and within a context in which the writers assume that listeners, and later readers, will naturally understand some inferences, cultural norms, understandings of philosophy of the day, and Jewish theology. Those assumptions mean that the writers did not see it necessary to write some of those assumptions down. They had no idea that thousands of years later, readers, particularly “gentile” readers, would have significant gaps in trying to understand some of the knowledge they took for granted in writing their gospel annals.
What does this mean for us? It means, that to read the scriptures responsibly, we need to not only recognize those gaps but research the knowledge that lies behind the “missing text.” We have to ask questions of the text. Why would a group of Greeks (gentiles) be dying (pun intended) to have a question and answer time with Jesus? What about? Could they want to debate something? What could that be? What might intrigue them? What differences between Greek philosophy and Jesus’ theology/philosophy will they need to understand? What is up with the sudden, abrupt insertion of the seed story and Jesus’ explanation that followed? Why did Jesus need those around him to hear God’s voice? Why the emphasis on “glorification?” What does that mean within this scripture?
Those are a lot of questions! But they are important questions. They spark our interest in finding out more about what could be going on within this encounter. Some assumptions of the writer for his contemporary readers have got to be missing for us!
Let’s take a look at this strange textual phenomenon in today’s scripture. When we quickly read through this scripture in John 12, we see that a group of Greeks wants to speak with Jesus, but directly afterword, we see Jesus suddenly launch into an explanation about a grain of wheat, eternal life, and his impending death and glorification. What on earth (pun intended yet again) is going on here? At first glance, it seems that Jesus ignores the Greeks’ request and simply moves on to an unrelated topic about his coming ordeal. Or if he’s addressing the crowd around him, including the Greeks, why is he suddenly launching into a theology about dying and bearing fruit? Why also does God’s voice manifest in the midst of his explanation, so as to “convince” his bystanders of the veracity of his statement?
First, we need to remind ourselves that people in Jesus’ time were not “dumber” than we are. They lived within a different time period, with different understandings of science, religion, medicine, and philosophy. They lived within a place in which multi-culturalism was a given. They debated. They asserted. They held intelligent, philosophical, deeply inquiring conversations about the meaning of God, life, faith, and concepts such as the soul, matter, spirit, and resurrection.
In Jesus’ time and place, Rome held political office, but the prevailing lingua franca and the prevailing philosophy and intellectual tradition in all of the surrounding areas was Greek. That meant Greek philosophy, Greek medicine, Greek understandings of truth, life, and the divine, and Greek language. Remember that the gospels, once written down, were written in Greek. John in particular is deeply immersed within Greek culture and the Greek intellectual tradition.
Even though Jewish teachers, rabbis, Pharisees, and priests taught their own unique philosophy and theology, they still lived within a culture that was predominantly and overwhelmingly influenced by Greek thought and language. Those Jews who were educated and inquiring would have studied both. Likewise, Greeks who were either interested or proselytes of the Jewish faith, either by marriage or simply by choice, were interested in how Jewish thought differed from theirs.
In the case of our scripture today, we see a group of Greeks coming to the Passover festival to celebrate. Perhaps these were some thrown out of the marketplace, as we learned last week. Perhaps they are new arrivals who have heard of Jesus’ fame and wanting time to question and understand his unique message, especially in the ways it differed from their ways of thinking and understanding.
This seems to be the case here.
Greek thought at that time would have been dominated by the great Greek philosophers, we know still today: Socrates (470-399 BCE), Plato (428-348 BCE), and Aristotle (384-323 BCE). Greek philosophy, metaphysics, politics, and ethics depended upon certain core ideas. One of those, pertinent to this particular conversation was the nature of the soul!
Here is where we find our missing information, in a distinct and vital difference between Greek thought and Jewish theology in the understanding of the soul.
Plato in deriving his thought from Socrates asserted that the soul existed from the beginning of time and goes on eternally. It is simple, disorganized, immortal, and indestructible. For Plato, the soul is uncreated and self-issuing. Within this description of the soul comes the concept of reincarnation. The soul exists as a separate entity from the body as a divine spark. Though the body can die, the soul cannot.
This is a key difference from what Jesus is trying to teach his disciples, and the Greek gentiles around him, and even the Sadducees, who also don’t believe in resurrection! For Jesus (and his Jewish theology), the soul is part of the body. When God decided to create human beings, as we read in Genesis, God takes soil and mixes it with water and creates a creature. God then inbreathes the creature with the breath of life from God’s own Spirit. The created human being is a holistic entity made up of body, mind, and soul. If the creature dies, the soul dies. But the good news is that God has the power to resurrect the human creature! The soul in Jewish theology (and Christian theology) is destructible. But it’s also resurrectable! This is vital to understand for us as we approach the end of Lent, because Christians believe in a bodily resurrection!
I think you can see now that Jesus’ response is starting to make sense!
Jesus begins by saying, the hour has come for him to be “glorified.” He then talks about the grain of wheat that falls into the earth and dies. That in order to be resurrected, it must first die. In other words, Jesus is explaining to his followers, and especially his Greek listeners why Plato’s view of the soul is not correct. He is explaining that 1) the soul is not separate from the body but we are holistic creatures that will die, 2) the soul is not pre-existent but that we were created by God (YHWH) as a holistic creature, and 3) when we die, our soul also dies, but God has the power and will to resurrect us as holistic creatures.
This theology is why it’s so important in the wake of Jesus’ resurrection that he appears in bodily form to his surprised followers. Christian theology is a theology that asserts a bodily (body/mind/soul) resurrection! By God. At God’s will.
Think for a moment about Ezekiel’s encounter with God in the Valley of Dry Bones. The bones (including the souls) of those slain in battle were dead, dry, and completely gone. God proclaims life, and they rise up not just as spirits but as whole people, with muscle, sinew, bone, and flesh!
Jesus’ example of the seed (in contrast to Artistotle’s example of wheat which asserts that exceptional citizens are the tallest stalks of grain) proves that God, not we, have the ultimate power to create life and abundance. That this occurs through resurrection!
For Jesus, we cannot become new creatures (whether in the afterlife eternal or in the here and now as “good” people) unless we first “die” and allow God to resurrect us.
Think Jesus’ born again conversation with Nicodemus!
We must not only die physically in order to be raised up to eternal life in our heavenly future, but we must “die to self,” separate ourselves from our earthly inclinations, in order to be resurrected into “citizens” of God’s intended kingdom.
This is why Jesus tells us that when he is lifted up, he will draw all people to himself. In and through Him, God’s kingdom can be grown, bearing fruit worthy of goodness, truth, and beauty (attributes of Greek philosophy) but also words used in Jesus’ theology.
For Jesus, the seed must “fall” from the stalk (from its earthly life source) and die (apothnasko) in order to produce more wheat (to be resurrected or “born again”). One cannot be lifted up by God unless and until one is willing to first “die.”
While the process of reincarnation emphasizes the “achievement” of the human spirit, Jewish and Christian theology emphasizes the power of God. For this reason, God’s voice is heard by all bystanders, proclaiming “glorification.”
Glorification is a beautiful word used here and gives us the final hint about what Jesus is trying to explain. The word is doxa. It means “to give weight.” It’s a brilliant double entendre that means both to ascribe identity, to reveal the true form of, to acknowledge due esteem, or to manifest the unconcealed essence of a matter. Doxa discloses Jesus’ true nature as Son of God, the divine in human form, and Messiah. Meanwhile, the physical meaning of the word doxa both means to acknowledge material weight (ie, the incarnated Jesus is not just spirit) and to weigh down (as in to fall from life). As the scripture tells us, this explanation was to indicate the kind of death Jesus was to die.
Jesus rejects reincarnation, even while affirming himself as God’s incarnation.
Jesus knows he must soon travel his way to the cross. Although he is troubled, he understands that in order to save the world and serve as a vehicle for humankind’s resurrection, he must first die.
If he has any hope that he can save the world, Jesus knows, this is the only way he can do it.
Through believing in him and following him, we receive an invitation to resurrection. Through Jesus’ death, we have a shot at life.
Hear the Apostles’ Creed, as we acknowledge exactly Jesus’ explanation that he gave both Jew and Greek that day before the Passover Feast. Repeat after me:
I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again;
he ascended into heaven,
he is seated at the right hand of the Father,
and he will come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.