Walking with Jesus through Lent, Pt.5: The Cross, Not the Stage

Thanks for joining me for another installment of “Walking with Jesus through Lent.” During this season of the church year, comprised of the roughly forty days between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday, Christians focus on the themes of repentance, mortality, and the need for salvation. Many Christians fast from certain pleasures during this time in order to demonstrate repentance or grow in faith. For Lutherans, this practice is not mandated but may be a helpful one for certain believers. To help us focus on the themes of Lent, this year I’ve chosen to meditate on the Gospel readings from the Revised Common Lectionary. Whether you are a longtime believer or a skeptic, I’m happy to have you along for the journey and for the opportunity to share with you these powerful passages from the life of Christ.

If you need to catch up, you can read the first post here, the second post here, the third post here, and the fourth post here.

This week, we read of a strange interaction that occurs between Jesus and a group of God-fearing Greeks who are in Jerusalem for the Passover festival. You can find this passage in John 12:20-33.

My husband preached on this passage this Sunday, and I have his permission to draw heavily on his ideas, since I feel he picked up on the central thrust of the passage as well as I could hope to do.

The Greeks in this passage were likely God-fearers (see Acts 17:17) who yet would not regard themselves as Jews.

Greeks were quite focused on ideas and wisdom. They were the philosophers of their era and always wanted to hear the latest ideas. Luke sets the stage for us in the book of Acts:

 (All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)–Acts 17:21 NIV

Paul tells us that “Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom…” (I Corinthians 1:22).

Greeks loved their ideas (which is wonderful), but they took things a step further. They longed to consume ideas, to possess them. They longed for the earthly power that came from prominent ideas. And so, it has been proposed that what they wanted from Jesus in this strange encounter was to take Him back to Athens as a new philosopher to show off to their friends. They probably wanted to promise Him a more prominent stage on which to spread His ideas. If this was in fact their intent, it certainly would explain Jesus’s strange response to their request to see Him.

Seemingly unprovoked, He launches into a monologue about His upcoming death. But in this monologue, we hear a Jesus who seems strangely tempted, much like He was tempted by Satan in the desert, tempted to gain the victory by power and dominance, spectacle, and compromise (Matthew 4:1-11). Jesus expresses the anguished temptation to take the lesser, but easier path:

 “Now my soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name!”–John 12:27-28

Jesus is tempted, but He will stay the course. God’s voice validates for all the listeners the rightness of the path of servanthood and self-giving. Jesus will accomplish far more going the hard way, the way of the cross, than He would by obtaining a prominent philosophy stage in Athens:

“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”–John 12:32

Jesus is not after some temporal victory; He is seeking something that will last and reverberate down through centuries and millennia and even into eternity.

So, what is this way of the cross? The cruciform life has perhaps been misunderstood by some Christians or caricatured by non-believers as sadism or masochism. It’s unfortunate that the cross has been treated so reductively, suggesting that it is a tool for the love of torture or pain or suffering. Such understandings ignore the powerful truths that have given hope to people for two thousand years, truths such as these: That that which is death is not the end, but that it can be turned to new life. There is no such thing as a lost cause. Giving oneself for the sake of others is far superior to dominance and power over others. One can walk through times of intense suffering with great hope in their hearts, for God is a resurrection God. Evil cannot win in the end because death–much like a seed that falls into the ground and dies–will ultimately yield new life. In the immortal words of C.S. Lewis in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, the cross is ultimately the idea that “death will begin working backwards.”

Jesus walked this path first. Like any good leader, He does not ask us to do anything that He was not willing to do Himself first. He freed us from sin, death, and the power of the devil through His death on the cross (vs.31). And in response, we are now called to walk in His footsteps, to live our lives not for dominance or self, but for God and neighbor (vv.25-26).

Jesus refuses to be possessed by the Greeks, to be owned by them. Whenever we as Christians try to own Jesus for our own ends, to manufacture Him materialistically, to gain dominance by earthly means, we fail to follow in His footsteps. Jesus will slip through our fingers if that’s what we want to do to Him. He will not be controlled, owned, or marketed, however much we may try to use Him in those ways.

He will, rather, be revealed through the cross: His own and ours. Again, Paul writes:

Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.–I Corinthians 1:22-25

Can we bear a world in which we lay down our dominance and power and privilege, in which our greatest strength is shown in our willingness to serve and not to be served, in which suffering is the gateway to new life? Such a worldview challenges us far more than the glittering lights of power and glory calling to us from every street corner–and also from so many churches. The glittering lights suggest I am the center of my own universe. The cross suggests there is more to live for than myself.

What about you? Do you find any meaning in the cross? It’s easy to pick on Christians for slapping a price tag and marketing campaign on Jesus (and it’s fair to critique this, of course), but is it just plain human to market, consume, seek to control, and seek glory instead of the hard path that yields life? Do you think it’s true that attempts to control Jesus are futile? Do you think there’s anything to the argument that we all struggle with Jesus because we can’t control or own Him? Because we need to rely on Him–and we don’t want to? I’m looking forward to your thoughts.

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