John 12:20-33
The Gospel traditionally attributed to John, the brother of James and disciple of Jesus, is unlike the other three gospels. Those three are so similar that they are collectively called the Synoptic Gospels. John has unique stories, like the wedding at Cana, where Jesus turns water into wine, and today’s story of the Greeks at the door. And I love today’s story, not because it contains deep theological meaning, but because it is a mess.
But first, let’s spend a moment on the cultural context. After all, Greeks are all over the place in the Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s letters, but they don’t really play a role in the life and ministry of Jesus.
Many Christians have ideas about Israel and Jews in the biblical context which are simply wrong. I know, for I was raised with the same sort of incorrect assumptions.
There was probably never such a thing as an ethnically-pure Abrahamic people. That is a myth they created in retrospect. More likely, a smallish group of escapees from Egyptian slavery merged with an existing population in Canaan, constructing a sense of shared identity, and developing an innovative religious system that would continue to evolve over many centuries.
King David, really more war lord usurper than king, consolidated the loose confederation of tribes into a single state, probably with a healthy amount of ethnic-cleansing. This kingdom, what most people think of today as Israel, only lasted a century almost three-thousand years ago. First it split, then it fell to foreign invaders.
The smaller southern portion survived as a semi-independent state longer than the north, and so centered itself in the continuing work of constructing identity and belief. Since the dominant tribe in the south claimed descent from Judah, son of Jacob, Judah would name the nation, and through that root, the people themselves, the precursors of today’s Rabbinic Judaism, which was founded after the rebellion against Rome in 70 C.E.
Already an amalgamation of migrants and escapees, in the 8th century B.C.E., the region became even more diverse. The Assyrians, who conquered the northern kingdom, resettled other people in the territory, and the Abrahamic people who were left in the north, known as Samaritans, were never fully absorbed into the southern Jewish polity. There are fewer than a thousand Samaritans still living in the land today, including some descended from Levi.
By the 6th century B.C.E., the south had been conquered as well. A rebellion in 140 B.C.E. and another round of ethnic cleansing re-claimed something close to the old Davidic borders, but that didn’t last long. The Maccabean revolt was a sort of MAGA movement, with nepotism and corruption, and royal interference in religion.
Jesus was born near the end of the reign of Herod the Great, the Roman puppet king who had restored the deteriorating Second Temple in Jerusalem. Herod was not ethnically Jewish. He was an Idumean, from a region that is today southern Jordan, descended from a conquered and converted people.
When the Romans took full control from their proxies, they colonized Judea and Galilee, destroying some Jewish cities and building new cities that were Greek, which is really just shorthand for not Jewish.
This attempt to replace the native population is not unlike what is going on in the exact same region today, as Netanyahu’s genocidal government supports ethnic cleansing on the West Bank.
Greek culture, called Hellenistic, dominated the eastern half of the Roman Empire, and Koine Greek, not Latin, was the common language of commerce and governance. The Christian Testament was written in Greek, meaning Paul was literate in Greek, and it is likely that Jesus and many of his followers spoke both Greek and Aramaic, a semitic language that was the common language of the streets. That some of the disciples were bilingual is evident in the frequent exchanges between Jesus and his circle and folks identified as non-Jews, like random centurions and residents of those Greek settlements as in the exorcism at Gerasene, notably not Jewish in that they raise pigs.
Jesus did not live in a Jewish state.
And for all of that, accepting the reality that the life and ministry of Jesus took place in a multi-cultural context, these Greeks at the door are probably still religious Jews from the centuries-old Diaspora, since they are in Jerusalem for Passover.
Doesn’t really matter either way, for as best we can tell, they are left at the door, as Jesus goes off on a tangent, foreshadowing the crucifixion, and while we’re at it, let’s throw in another booming voice from heaven, similar to the baptism of Jesus and the Transfiguration on the mountain.
And this morning, I’m not interested in the Son of Man or archetypal “Human One” trope or the foreshadowing or even God’s voice.
I just love the mess.
I find the claim that any text is the definitive and only word of God terrifying, whether that is the Torah, the translation of the Christian Bible we call the King James, the Qur’an, or the Book of Mormon.
I find true believers terrifying, whether their belief is in the God-dude who walks by Elijah’s cave or in Xenu the inter-galactic dictator or in Q revealing the secrets of a deep state child sex-trafficking ring in the basement of a D.C. pizza parlor.
Doubt is good, for there is more we do not know than what we do know.
Messiness is life, not just the result of life.
Our weird little species of upright primate exists because reproduction is messy, and some mistakes are better than others, naturally selected as Mr. Darwin claimed. There is nothing in creation that is static, that is self-contained. The minute you try to stick a pin through something and fix it in time and space, you kill it and have already failed, for time marches on anyways, and life at scale, large and small, is weird and entangled.
I understand the fear that wants answers, it just isn’t what I choose for myself, for fear, like regret and anger, can be a useful tool, but too much of it will leave you hollowed out and twisted.
When the early Christians turned the oral traditions about Jesus into written gospels, they preserved his humanity, his messiness, despite their growing conviction that he was also an incarnation of God. The Jesus in the gospels loses his temper. He weeps. He says things that objectively aren’t true. And the gospel authors and redactors didn’t clean it all up. Greeks show up at the door and there is no closure. Like seriously, what happened to them?
Our brains hate this. We are curious, and always at work clarifying and categorizing. We want answers, and if we don’t get answers, we make stuff up. We want people to be all good or all bad, accuse politicians of flip-flopping if they change their mind, as if new data is somehow bad, as if learning is bad, though at the same time we are all about new data and learning, so yeah… explain that, slap a label on it, and put it in a box, because that there is a mess.
A beautiful and glorious mess.
As we continue on the road to Golgotha, so many want simple answers, want to believe that everything is perfectly ordered and is meaningful, that the disciples stole a donkey for the Palm Sunday ride and that was magically okay, that the brutality of the crucifixion was divinely scripted.
Maybe that works for you. It doesn’t work for me. I’m okay with human violence killing Jesus. It just makes the Easter victory all that sweeter. Because in my world, people are often more than one thing, so that Jesus can be both victim and victor.
You may have it all together. Maybe the Greeks come to your door when they are expected and sit down for a cup of Earl Grey.
My Greeks? They’re wandering around outside, not completely sure which door is the right door, and I can’t hear them knock anyways because Alexa is playing “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” in the kitchen and I’m folding laundry upstairs. But I’ll realize that they’re here eventually, and those Breakfast Bars will just have to pass for cookies, but we’ll still laugh and still be present in the midst of all the chaos and the demanding barks of the Golden Retriever.
For as the meme goes, my ducks are not all in a row, and I’m pretty sure a couple of them aren’t even ducks.
Stop trying to stuff the world into a box that is way too small. Stop trying to stuff God into a box that is way too small. And while you’re at it, stop trying to stuff yourself into a box that is way too small. The box is stupid anyways, constructed by prior generations, by wingnuts and charlatans and the con-artists on Madison Avenue.
Just be. Just be all the things, for you are all the things, good and bad, though, you know, I wouldn’t be much of a pastor if I didn’t urge you to lean into the good. No matter how it turns out, you’ll be loved, and you’ll be covered with our Creator’s Amazing Grace.
Amen.