Alter the Altar
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Imagine you are a farmer. Imagine that you are a farmer and you have a seed. One seed. And you have been asked to grow food for an entire nation. An entire city. An entire neighborhood. Even your entire house.
You spend countless hours and resources preparing for this seemingly impossible task. You have cleared your finest field for this task, knowing this field has always been your best producer. You have shined up your rototiller, greased up your combine, polished your silos, and everything is in place. You have prepared emergency drainage systems in case of flooding that also will bring water to the crops if they are too dry. You researched meticulously the soil additives necessary to keep your loam at the peak acidity for bountiful growth. You have planned a system to take your first sprouts and plant them properly in new sections, knowing that with only one seed, this will take great care to make sure you don’t kill the original sprout.
But you start to get worried. After all, you only have one seed to feed everyone. What if you mess it up? What if this one seed is rotten and you look like a failure? What if you don’t succeed and your family starves? So, in your fear, you don’t ever plant the seed. And your greatest fears come to fruition, and all you feel is shame.
Now, what I have done here is given a classically over-dramatic illustration that I am sure plenty of preachers have tried to use to scare their congregations into doing what is pleasing to God. I tell it because it reflects how I often struggle as a scholar. I let fear infiltrate my life and my studies so much that I either never finished the work or I would spend the last days of my semester so exhausted and stressed that I would ruin myself just to finish what I could have finished weeks ago had I just altered my perception.
I can’t stand here and tell you that this is no longer an issue in my life. I still put things off way too long out of fear. Assignments still get missed, and I still have to suffer the consequences. But as I was preparing this week for our time of conversation here, I kept getting the same sentence running through my head, over and over again:
If we don’t alter how we approach the altar, then the altar will never fully alter our lives.
Now, reading that sentence here makes complete sense. But I know that hearing it is incredibly confusing, so let’s spend this time together unpacking what I mean by this, if that’s OK with you.
The gospel writer here gives us one of the more memorable teachings of Jesus: a grain of wheat left unburied. But the story begins just before this, as Jesus makes his grand entry to Jerusalem. All of Jerusalem, even the Pharisees, saw what was coming: the world was going to start flocking to Jesus. So a few days later, we see a few Greeks approaching Philip asking to speak with Jesus. Something I find interesting here, and Trinity Divinty scholar D.A. Carson also notes, “Strictly speaking, Jesus does not respond to the direct request of the Gentiles, but to the situation that their request represents. At the very moment when the Jewish authorities are turning most [bitterly] against him, some Gentiles begin to clamour [sic] for his attention.”[1] Just as Paul discusses in Romans years later, the Jews were turning away, the Gentiles were running toward. While the faithful were doubting, the others were desperate. I think it is a poignant and much needed reminder that even the most faithful of believers can benefit from the child-like faith of a new believer or of a non-believer with some questions.
Philip and Andrew go to Jesus with their request, and before they can even get a word out, Jesus begins to speak.
“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” Knowing that Philip and Andrew were unsure of how to handle these Greeks approaching their party, a group of Jews, Jesus sets the tone by affirming that the time has come where more people than the few Greeks present will come seeking the message Jesus has to offer. But in order to receive the message Jesus has to offer, Jesus first has to die. We do not ever find out if these Greeks ever did get to see Jesus; they function more as a “plot mover” than as characters in the story. They only signify a major shift in the narrative. We have heard, for eleven chapters, of this coming glorification, starting with John the Baptist in chapter one; only now do we get a clearer picture of what will have to take place to make it possible.
“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.” This imagery of the grain would have been a fairly accessible metaphor to the first century Ancient Near East. And not to bring science too far into the mix this morning, Jesus makes a claim here that science might frown at a bit. A seed does not have to die to germinate when planted in the ground. In fact, while some seeds must shed a small shell, most seeds are ready to germinate as is. Whether the people had knowledge of this or not is speculation, but the question asks why Jesus would make a statement that simply is not true.
I think the answer comes in his next sentence. “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” Jesus was not referring to the biological death of the seed here. He was referring to the spiritual death that occurs when a seed is planted. Jesus personifies the seed as a being who gives up its existence as a seed so that it may become a bountiful plant. In the same way, Jesus asserts that if a human should love life here on earth, they will lose their life eternally. If anything, Jesus could even be referring to the shell that some seeds must shed. I’m sure I am not the only one who feels as though I must sometimes put up a shell of my own when things get tough. I know I have an instant reaction to put up my defenses and protect what I hold dear to me, but that is not the response God asks of us. Even though we are trying to protect what is left inside, we really are simply blocking out what is outside, that is, the light and hope of Christ.
This is part of what I mean when I say:
We must alter how we approach the altar. We must alter, or change, so a-l-t-E-r, how we surrender at the throne, the a-l-t-A-r. So Jesus makes it clear, we must not love life on earth.
But what does it mean to love life here on earth?
It would not be hard to reason that there might have been several people in the early church and even today who would hear this passage and think that they must deny everything pleasurable in this life, and would take matters to severe ascetic living, trying to fulfill the teachings of Jesus. But I would argue that losing your life is not a denial at all. Losing your life is an acceptance of the calling that Christ has called us to. We, Christians, the church at large, should not be so focused on saying no to anything that might distract us, but our attention should be on saying yes to anything that might draw in the poor, the meek, the oppressed, the broken, to the richness of Christ, just as Jesus’ message attracted the Greeks in Jerusalem, even though the Pharisees and other Jews turned their faces from him.
The church needs to stop protecting itself, and start protecting the people in our world who truly need a savior. I am willing to make the claim now that, if the church was to start living an active faith, as I think Jesus is trying to say here, we wouldn’t have to worry about protecting ourselves in the first place. But we have grown complacent. We pray for God to move mountains without realizing that God made us to move them. We hope that someone will step up and serve in ministries but don’t make the effort to do so ourselves. We have fallen into a state of apathy, church, and this is how we will certainly lose our lives in eternity.
Now, stepping off of my soap box, the next thing Jesus says is found numerous times in all of the gospel accounts, but not in quite the same terms. “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.” Scholars believe that this is the Johannine slant on “take up your cross and follow me” passages found often in the Synoptic Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Jesus is giving the disciples good assurance that the path that is honored is troubled. If whoever serves Jesus must follow Jesus, that doesn’t mean follow just his life. It doesn’t mean follow just his life and teachings. It means that we are each called to make the painful journey that Jesus was just a few days from making, the journey to death.
The good news comes here, friends. While Christ’s death was humanly divine, our death must be dinively human. What I mean is this: Christ had to die the physical death to give humanity the spiritual life. We have to die the spiritual death while among humanity to honor the divine calling on our lives. If we do this, if we surrender our spiritual lives to Christ, if we truly give it all at the altar, it will have enormous meaning for the rest of our lives.
But Jesus continues here in a way that might initially trouble the reader who simply glazes over his next words. “Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.” When I read this verse, my mind was confused. I had heard so many times in church the account of the Garden of Gethsemane found in the other gospels. There, Jesus clearly prays to God to ‘take this cup from me’. John’s account of Jesus doesn’t seem to line up with this, though.
While John does say that Jesus was troubled, Jesus seems to have a little rhetorical, almost ironic, aside with himself. I can hear it now..
[read in sarcastic voice]
“And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour!’ NO!”
And this troubled me for weeks. I found out I was preaching this weekend in January, so I have spent almost two months asking what to make of this tension between the agonizing Jesus elsewhere, and the snarky Jesus here. But then I spent less time on the latter part of this verse, and more time on the first few words: Now my soul is troubled.
Jesus was agonizing over what was to come. Maybe he knew that his disciples might not remain steadfast when he reveals what he reveals later. Maybe he wanted more time to change the minds of the Jewish leaders. But still, he said his soul was troubled. Imagine the soul of Jesus, troubled. He was genuinely upset, and while John’s account glazes over his version of Gethsemane, most likely because of John’s purpose and reason for writing to his unique audience, it should not be read that Jesus wasn’t upset. Jesus did offer a prayer there to God—‘Father, save me from this hour.’ But because he was perfectly in line with the will of the Father, this is as far as his prayer would go. Jesus knew that his purpose was this future death.
So he proclaims, “Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” 30 Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. 31 Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. 32 And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” 33 He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.
There is much debate over why this voice from heaven was not able to be heard by anyone listening, especially when Jesus responds that the voice has come for their sake. I think the significance is not in the content of the voice, but the presence of the voice of thunder just before Jesus declares the historic truth that would happen just days later. Anyone who was truly listening would have taken the thunder to mean that something spiritual was about to be relayed, so it would have alerted them to listen closely to what was coming next.
The thunder altered how they were listening, because what came next would forever alter their lives, as well as the lives of all those to come. Jesus being lifted up would make him the altar of sacrifice to all people.
Jesus’ main focus at this time was to declare to his disciples that his time among them was coming to the end, and they must begin to change the way they life to receive the benefits of all they had heard. Jesus wanted to make it as clear as possible. If the disciples—in fact, if all the world—did not begin to shift their focus and their dedication to God, and make drastic changes in the content and substance of their sacrifices, then any sacrifice they make will never benefit their souls in eternity. Jesus was making it clear:
If you do not alter how you approach the altar, then the altar will never fully alter your life. If you do not change how you surrender, then your surrender will never fully transform your life. If you do not lose this life on earth, you will lose your life in heaven.
Reap that single seed, your testimony about the good news of Jesus, in the fields wherever you go. Let God be the sower, so that your faith may multiply so much that it spills out into the fields and lives of your neighbor.
[1] D. A. Carson, The Gospel according to John, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Leicester, England; Grand Rapids, MI: Inter-Varsity Press; W.B. Eerdmans, 1991), 437.