JOHN 12: 20-33

Jottings on John…Lent 5…Revised 2018 

The ‘Greeks’ who come to worship at the feast ‘want to see Jesus’. Are they among the ‘god-fearers’ attracted to the monotheism of Judaism? We don’t know for sure if they’d get past the Court of the Gentiles, but that’s OK if that’s where Jesus is teaching. What happens to those who come to our church hoping to meet God? Do they face barriers of any kind: structural, people, or attitudes, that may keep them from ‘seeing God’? Keep them from coming face to face with Jesus as these Greeks here want to do?

Why does Philip feel he needs to ‘get the nod’ from Andrew before approaching Jesus about the Greeks? Is there any hesitancy in the way we meet new people- opportunities? Dare we ask, “If someone were to come in here among us today saying they ‘wanted to see Jesus’ how would we approach them? Would we ‘pass the buck’ to someone else? A starting point might be to ask something like, ‘How well does our ‘front of house’ function. Long personal experience shows me how important the way we greet & receive people to worship, both regulars & strangers, is.

If we were to ‘mark’ our congregation on our performance as a people of God gathering to meet Jesus, how would we fare at this point? If the result is not too encouraging, can we learn anything from this passage to help us improve? 

  

We don’t know if these ‘Greeks’ of our story do actually get to meet Jesus. Neither Jesus nor John makes any further mention of them. Their arrival on the scene, though, seems to precipitate Jesus into recognising the climax of His mission on earth has arrived ¹. He speaks accordingly. Are we making as much as we might of ‘climaxes’ - in our liturgical observances, in on-going parish life, in our personal life? May it be time we discerned climactic possibilities God is creating under our noses, & grasp them?! Might the arrival of some new-comer onto our scene just be a God-sent game-changer for us?

In all this, do we need to learn to ‘let go & let God’ as Jesus does? Matthew Fox paraphrases Meister Eckhart on this passage as: ‘Jesus is so full of letting go He was able to let go of life. So free of letting go was the Divine Word that it could become human.’ ²  A thought to discern, deeply, & put into practice?

¹ Leon Morris, St. John, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1971, p. 590  ² Breakthrough, Doubleday, NY, 1980 p. 349