The Hour Has Come

A curious encounter takes place in the twelfth chapter of the Gospel of John. Some Greeks who are in Jerusalem for Passover come to Jesus’s disciples and say, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip and Andrew relay this message to Jesus, and Jesus responds  by saying, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” What does Jesus mean by the “hour”? And what is it about this exchange that indicates to him that his hour has come?

The key word here is “Greeks.” These are Gentiles who are asking to meet Jesus. They represent the world beyond the confines of Judaism—what the Hebrew Scriptures call “the nations.” In the fourth Gospel, apart from his conversation with a Samaritan woman (Samaritans were sort of “half-Jews” descended from the survivors of the old northern kingdom of Israel who had intermarried with the Gentile peoples in that region), Jesus has dealt almost entirely with Jews. These Greeks at the festival are the first full-on Gentiles to make an appearance in John.

That’s the signal to Jesus that the hour has finally arrived. Jesus understands his mission in terms of the suffering servant of Isaiah, one of whose roles is to be “a light to the nations.” In his prologue John describes Jesus as “the light of all people” (John 1:4) and “the true light, which enlightens everyone” (John 1:9). Now that Gentiles have been drawn to Jesus’s light, he knows his hour has come.

By his “hour,” of course, he means his death. He explains the connection between being a light to the nations and being crucified in verse 24: “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.” It is only by remaining faithful to the point of death that Jesus will truly be the light to the nations that God has designated him to be.

This word is not just for Jesus. Three chapters later, he will describe the relationship between his followers and himself with the metaphor of a grapevine. “I am the vine,” he says, “you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). Our calling as followers of Jesus is to bear fruit, and unless our grains of wheat fall into the earth and die, that simply won’t happen.

As we draw closer to the climactic events of Holy Week, let us recommit ourselves to putting to death everything that threatens to get in the way of our abiding in Jesus and allowing him to abide in us, so that we too may bear much fruit.

Creative Conflict

If you are like most people, including most church people, you are risk-averse, and you try to avoid conflict whenever possible. It is the rare person who considers conflict something to be embraced, something that can lead to positive results. Most of us think of conflict in strictly negative terms. We don’t like to be at odds with another person; it makes us uncomfortable. Conflict can undermine one’s image of oneself as the kind of person whom other people like. We like to be liked. We like to get along.

Sometimes, however, conflict is inevitable. Paul and Barnabas find this out in Acts 15. They have returned to their home base of Antioch after attending the council of Jerusalem, where they successfully defended their practice of preaching the gospel to Gentiles. The council ruled that Gentile converts would not have to be circumcised or observe the Jewish purity laws, beyond abstaining “from things polluted by idols and from fornication and from whatever has been strangled and from blood” (Acts 15:20). Once this agreement was reached they sent representatives to Antioch to deliver the decision. After they did so, “they were sent off in peace by the believers to those who had sent them” (Acts 15:33). Everything was hunky-dory, and good feelings reigned.

After some time in Antioch, Paul goes to Barnabas and suggests that they take another tour of the cities they visited on their missionary journey in order to see how the churches they had established were faring. Barnabas agrees to the trip, but here is where the good feelings go away. He wants to take a young man named John Mark who traveled with them for part of their trip the last time but left the team at Pamphylia and returned home to Jerusalem. Luke tells of Mark’s leaving in Acts 13:13 but gives no reason for his departure. Paul, however, apparently took it as a betrayal, and now he rejects the idea of having Mark accompany them again.

This incident offers some insight into the two missionaries’ characters. Paul comes across as a headstrong, rigid personality who holds himself and his companions to a high standard and who is not tolerant toward anyone who does not measure up to that standard. Barnabas, on the other hand, true to his name, which means “Son of Encouragement,” is a compassionate, forgiving soul who is willing to give Mark a chance to redeem himself from his earlier failure. Paul may have been right in his assessment of Mark’s character, and Barnabas may have been too lenient, too quick to forgive, but I know which of the two men I would prefer to travel with, and it’s not Paul.

The conflict between Barnabas and Paul becomes so severe that they part company. Barnabas takes Mark and sets out to Cyprus, while Paul teams up with a guy named Silas and travels throughout Syria and southeastern Asia Minor, visiting and, ironically enough, offering encouragement to the churches there.

This episode, as painful as it must have been in the moment, serves to shed light on the overarching theme of the book of Acts, which is the unhindered nature of the gospel. Throughout the narrative, obstacles arise again and again, threatening to stop the spread of the good news. Conflicts between Hebraic and Hellenistic Jews, questions about taking the gospel to Samaritans and God-fearing Gentiles such as Cornelius, and the dispute over whether pagan Gentiles could be accepted into the faith without first becoming Jews all represent potential barriers to the gospel’s advance. Arrests, persecutions, and this conflict between two of the most prominent leaders in the young church threaten to hinder the forward motion of the message.

But in each case the Holy Spirit overcomes the obstacle and sends the movement in new and fruitful directions. The stoning of Stephen and the persecution that followed scattered the apostles so that the gospel moved beyond the borders of Palestine. Peter’s bold decision to baptize Cornelius was the Spirit’s way of cracking open the shell that bound the church within a Jewish-only framework, and Paul’s and Barnabas’s work among the pagan Gentiles demolished what was left of that shell. Now here in chapter 15 a bitter dispute between two leaders, a conflict that could have had far-reaching negative consequences, leads to a doubling of the missionary effort. No barrier is too strong for the Spirit to overcome. Nothing can stop the unhindered gospel.

The story of the apostles’ argument shows us that conflict can be creative. It need not be the death knell of a relationship; it can instead help germinate seeds that otherwise would remain sterile, thereby producing fruit in unexpected and wonderful ways. The Spirit is always ready to transform our conflicts into something positive, holy even. The question is, are we willing to open ourselves to the Spirit’s gracious work in our lives and the conflicts that will inevitably come?

Control

I “attended” a livestream interfaith prayer service the other night, after the chaotic and shameful events at the Capitol, and one of the participants offered this nugget as part of  her prayer: “We know that you are in control.” Meaning God. It’s a sentiment I have heard expressed countless times, but it is becoming harder and harder for me to countenance. The thought that came to mind this time, and which I almost shared in the comments pane, was, “God is in control? Then God has an interesting strategy.”

If God were in control of the events at the Capitol, at what point did God intend to step in and exercise that control? Apparently not before a woman was killed and our country became a laughingstock or an object of pity in the eyes of the world. If God is in control when it comes to the Covid-19 pandemic, what’s the magic number of deaths that will trigger God’s action? Two million? Three million? If God was in control during, say, the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, then God must have meant for a quarter of a million people to die, right?

I don’t mean to blaspheme or sound impious. What I do mean to do is to look at the world clear-eyed and forgo comforting fictions such as, “We know God is in control,” or, “The Lord sits enthroned over the flood; / the Lord sits enthroned as king forever,” as Psalm 29:10 would have us believe. These statements, when contrasted with the reality of life in the world, lay bare the inadequacy of the depiction of God as a divine interventionist who can miraculously step in to avert disaster. Or bring it, for that matter. Logically, if God is in control and 360,000 people in our country lie dead from a viral pandemic, with more dying every day, then this controlling God must get the credit for those deaths. That’s the clear implication we ignore when we blithely mouth the untruth that “God is in control.”

So where is our hope if we cannot trust in a divine puppet master directing the activity of the world? I may sound like a record stuck on a scratch when I say this, but I believe our hope lies in the portrait of God that process theology paints. This God is not in control in any simplistic sense; rather, God accompanies creation and seeks to persuade recalcitrant matter to go in a direction that will result in the full flourishing of life for all concerned. But it’s not called recalcitrant matter for nothing. It resists. We resist. Viruses that arise in the course of the evolutionary processes that make life possible resist God’s direction and wreak devastating havoc. Think of the last time you tried to convince somebody who held a different political opinion to come over to your way of seeing things, and you will have an idea of what God is up against in seeking to persuade the world to operate according to God’s good and perfect will.

Make no mistake, “The voice of the Lord is powerful; / the voice of the Lord is full of majesty” (v. 4), and we ought always to “ascribe to the Lord the glory of [God’s] name; / worship the Lord in holy splendor” (v. 2). But we do not ascribe glory to God when we misrepresent the divine nature. You may come to a different conclusion, but I find more comfort in the thought that God is unequivocally for us and is working with all God’s might to bring about the best outcomes despite considerable resistance than in the  notion of a God who is “in control” but allows death and destruction on a massive scale. That God sounds to me more monstrous than divine.

I for one do not wish to worship a monster. I want to worship the God of infinite love, and seek to cooperate with that God in the reclamation and renewal of the world.