This Sunday’s sermon focuses on God’s promise of a new covenant. This new covenant will be written on the people’s hearts, and unlike previous covenants that the people broke, keeping this covenant will be entirely up to God.
Several thousand years after Jeremiah proclaims this covenant, we know that it is ultimately fulfilled by Jesus. God has indeed brought us salvation through Jesus’ death on the cross and resurrection at Easter. Thanks be to God!
Today’s Scripture readings are Jeremiah 31:31-34 and John 12:20-33. Much of this sermon is adapted from my sermon on these texts from March 18, 2018, for which I found helpful Karoline Lewis’ reflection on Working Preacher on seeing Jesus.
Here’s the worship livestream from Christ the King and the sermon audio podcast.
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Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen
Today’s Gospel begins with a deceptively simple request. There are some people who want to see Jesus.
Since they’re Greek, though, they’re not sure this Jewish rabbi will want to see them, so they start by going up to Philip and asking him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” In the verse right before our reading, the Pharisees were concerned about Jesus’ growing influence. Worried about losing their power, they complained to each other about the whole world going after Jesus. These Greeks prove their point.
As it turns out, Philip is the only one of the disciples who has a Greek name, rather than Hebrew, so it makes sense for these Greek inquirers to look to him for an introduction – they see him as the most approachable.
Almost a decade ago, Christin and I had something similar happen on a trip to Tanzania with a group from Wartburg Seminary.
One of the people in our group was Tawanda Murinda. He’s now an ELCA pastor in Grand Forks, North Dakota, but he’s originally from Zimbabwe. He worked at a summer camp in Iowa with Christin, so we’ve known him for quite a while.
On this trip, our group consisted of myself, Christin, Tawanda, and four other white people. Over and over, whenever we pulled up to a new site in Tanzania, people would look at us, size up our group, and come up to start talking to Tawanda, assuming because he was black, he was the most approachable and would understand Swahili.
Not a bad assumption, but he was from Zimbabwe where the language they speak is Shona, not Swahili, so he couldn’t understand them either! You can’t always judge what languages people speak by the way they look.
But it makes sense for these Greeks to start with the person they think will be most approachable. So, they come to Philip (who’s actually from Bethsaida in Galilee) and they ask to see Jesus. Philip goes to Andrew—who apparently would have been the right one to ask—and then they go together to ask Jesus.
Oddly, that’s the last we hear about these Greeks. But their impulse is correct. Wanting to see Jesus is always right.
In John, seeing Jesus means more than just glancing at him with your eyes; it means having a relationship. They don’t want to just learn about him, or just shake his hand, they want to actually be in the presence of God.
Isn’t that what we want too? We’re here today because we want to see Jesus…right? Of course, they don’t completely understand what that means…and neither do we.
When Jesus hears their request, he announces, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”
The hour has come. This is something new. This is a turning point in John’s story of Jesus. Earlier, not just once, but three separate times, John’s readers have been told Jesus’ time has not yet come. That’s why he was reluctant to do his first miracle of turning water into wine at the Cana wedding. It’s also why the authority’s previous attempts to silence Jesus had failed.
Now, Jesus says, the hour has come. This is it! Everyone is going to get to see God’s glory revealed in Jesus, although it won’t be in the way anyone expects. Everything from here on out leads to the cross, and as John’s gospel makes clear, Jesus knows it. The voice from heaven confirms it. Jesus is doing the Father’s will.
We know it, but the disciples and the crowd of people standing there still don’t get it. They think maybe it’s an angel, or maybe just some thunder. They don’t understand who they’re seeing.
It’s often hard to see God working in the moment. Maybe that’s because God works in such strange ways, because God has a strange idea of glory. Jesus is among us here today, as we’re gathered as Christ’s body. Anytime the church is gathered, even if there are only two people, Jesus promises to be present.
But so often, it’s hard to see God’s presence, to see Jesus among us. I mean, look at the people sitting near you. We don’t look like the kind of people who should be trusted with the best news in the world. God’s glory rarely looks like the kind of earthly glory we expect.
That’s where the Holy Spirit comes in. It takes the eyes of faith to recognize Jesus, because we don’t usually get a thunderous voice from the heavens to let us know He’s here. (Although, in this story, a thunderous voice doesn’t seem to help much.)
Instead, Jesus is present among us in much more ordinary ways—ordinary ways that are at the same time much more strange. The bread and wine of communion. The water of baptism. The people of God gathered together.
Jesus is present whenever we reach out to bless others, whether that’s showing up at a funeral to give comfort to a grieving family, sending a card to someone who’s sick, or inviting someone in need of good news to come and see what Easter is all about.
We trust Jesus is present when we pray for each other and for our world. Jesus is present in the songs we sing, in the meals we serve, in the ways we show up for one another as siblings in Christ.
Jesus says, “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also.” We see Jesus, and we pray that the world sees Jesus through the work we do as a church, both here in our neighborhood and through the ways we support our wider church.
Of course, even those examples are the kind of glory we can understand. The idea of seeing Jesus in good works makes some sense to us. What Jesus says in this reading is even more unexpected. He compares his glory to a grain of wheat falling into the earth and dying. God’s glory is revealed in death and suffering.
Martin Luther called this idea a theology of the cross, rather than a theology of glory. That’s another core Lutheran principle, like the idea of Law and Gospel we talked about over the last two weeks.
The theology of the cross testifies that there is no situation too hopeless for God to be present, no situation so far gone that God can’t redeem it. As we talk about at funerals, because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, we know even death does not stop God’s love for us.
When we truly see Jesus, we realize he’s present in even the worst parts of life. God brings new life out of death.
During this season we’ve been talking about lot about covenants—agreements and promises that govern relationships. We started with God’s covenant with Noah and all of creation to never flood the earth again.
We looked at the more personal covenant God makes with Abraham, to make a great nation even when it seemed impossible, and the covenant with Israel to be their God who gives them laws to follow so that they can live as God’s chosen people in the world.
Last week, we talked about how God’s covenant is unbreakable, how God refuses to give up on us even in our sin, even when we turn away and break the covenant.
Now, as we approach the end of Lent, we hear from Jeremiah that God promises to make a new covenant, not like the old ones that the people broke, but a new covenant of grace and forgiveness, where God’s law is not something external to be followed, but something written directly on our hearts.
The hour has come. God is doing a new thing. For the people of Israel in exile who first heard of this new covenant, it meant God was restoring their land, making them a nation again. For us as Christians over 2,500 years later, we recognize the new thing God is doing is entering into creation in the person of Jesus Christ. God has come to be with us.
As Paul Rock writes, “God is taking things to a whole new level, more personal, more intimate. As Jeremiah explains the intensity of this commitment, we come to see that God is hopelessly in love: ‘I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.’” (A Preacher’s Guide to Lectionary Sermon Series – Volume 1: Thematic Plans for Years A, B, and C [Amazon Affiliate link], pg. 109)
Jeremiah uses the image of marriage. God is deeply in love with you and is willing to do whatever it takes to be in relationship with you. God will do whatever it takes to redeem you.
God enters into the brokenness of our world to give us life. God chooses to be born as a frail little baby in a humble home in a backwater village to save the world. Out of Jesus’ death comes life for the world.
Do you see Jesus? Do you see the new thing God is doing?
Jesus will be glorified, but his glory will look like defeat, like death on a cross. His glory is in his giving himself up for you and me, out of love. Defeat comes before victory. Whether they know it or not, this is the story those Greeks wanted to get involved with. This is the Savior they wanted to see.
As we prepare for Holy Week, for Palm Sunday next week when we’ll hear the story of Jesus’ passion, I invite you to reflect on what it means to follow a God whose victory comes through defeat.
Consider where you look to see Jesus, and notice where God is working in your life. And rejoice, for God is doing a new thing. And may the peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen