Jeremiah 31.31-34
Psalm 51
Hebrews 5.1-10
John 12.20-33
“Now is the judgment of this world...” John 12.31
Today’s text stands at a crucial juncture in the Gospel of John, marking the end of Jesus’ public ministry and the beginning of the Passion. The Sanhedrin, reacting to the raising of Lazarus, have made their official decision to kill Jesus. But surely this has been in the cards for quite awhile, at least from the healing of the paralyzed man on the Sabbath (back in chapter five) or even from the cleansing of the Temple, which John places early, in his second chapter. Jesus has been fearless in his criticism of the Jerusalem authorities, but he will see to it that events play out on his terms, not theirs. For some time now he has been hiding out, evading the religious authorities, making public appearances only in situations where he can elude their grasp. Thus the inability of the ‘Greeks’ -- perhaps Greek-speaking Jews from the Diaspora in Jerusalem for the festival -- to find him. Jesus is, as he says, troubled: he does not regard his impending humiliation and death with equanimity. Yet he is steadfastly confident that his death will be the means by which he will be vindicated and the Father who sent him glorified. He is keenly aware that soon he will be put on trail, condemned, and executed in a way reserved for the scum of the earth, but he asserts “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out (12.31).
But where is it? Where is the judgment Jesus claims is about to fall? Soon Judas will make his deal, the other disciples will make themselves scarce, and there will be Jesus abandoned and alone, pulled into the judicial apparatus of Roman occupied Palestine and, with routine brutality, executed. His followers will shortly thereafter make confused and extravagant claims about his being resurrected but if so he soon disappears and leaves them to the tender mercies of the powers that be. Then things will pretty much go on as before. The Romans and the Sanhedrin and all their successors down through the centuries still rule. No apocalyptic setting things right, no settling of the score; divine punishment is not meted out to the wicked, there is no elevation of the downtrodden, no justice, no comprehensible judgment.
It’s no surprise then that those who long for such a judgment -- and surely in some way or other we all do -- look to the future, not back to the death of Jesus. But surely that can’t be right. Jesus must have known what he was talking about. The last judgment, last in the sense of being final and ultimate, must lie behind us, not ahead of us. Despite appearances to the contrary it can only be the death of Jesus that is God’s irrevocable judgment on this world.
Lent is a meditation on the cross of Christ, a sustained contemplation of what it means for us to live under that cross. It is for that reason a consideration of the last judgment, the judgment of this world.
The term is ambiguous: “...the judgment of this world” can mean God’s judgment on this world. This is its primary meaning in John’s text. But the words can be read the other way: this world’s judgment on God. There’s also grounds for this reading in the Gospel of John: Jesus again and again describes the leaders of Israel as seeing God in Jesus and rejecting him in favor of an idol of their own religious self-righteousness and craving for for power and purity. They have weighed Jesus in the balance of their doctrinal and ethical judgment and found him wanting. A God who would have this unclean Galilean call him father -- indeed, virtually identify himself with him -- is a God they will have nothing to do with. Any God weak enough for them to arrest and put on trail is a God they want no part of. They want a powerful God, a God who will give the Romans the boot and make everything come out right.
The New Testament term we translate judgment is the Greek word krisis and this is very much what we see in John’s Gospel. The ongoing confrontation of Jesus and Israel’s religious leaders builds to a crisis that is resolved only when they have Jesus destroyed. But this crisis, this judgment, is also a matter of making clear what’s what and who’s who. There’s an old saying of the Church: crux probit omnia: the cross puts everything to the test. The true nature of the two sides: Jesus and the Jewish religious authorities, God and the world, is revealed in the cross of Jesus. Jesus heals the sick and restores the dead to life; his punishment is death. The world executes God for blasphemy.
It’s important to pause and note that there’s nothing unique here on the part of the Jewish religious leaders who judged God and found him unacceptable. It’s a part of all of us; it’s part of what it is to be a sinner. The resentment and vindictiveness that make attractive for us the idea of a future judgment that is a comeuppance for the wicked, a future judgment in which it will be revealed that we’ve been righteous and in the right all along, show that we, as much as the executioners of Jesus, partake in the original sin: “you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.” In all of us there’s something that wants to be rid of God and go it alone, putting ourselves up as gods in our own right, taking care of ourselves and lording it over everyone else, making sure that everyone gets exactly what they deserve.
The cross of Christ means that the world shows its true colors. More important, in this crisis of judgment we see God for who he really is. The world demands a God who can deliver the goods, who will make things right while standing unmoved, untouched, unsullied beyond the world’s dirt and pain. Yet this is a God that the true God we see in Jesus refuses to be. We know him for who he is when we see Jesus crucified. The Latin American theologian Leonardo Boff wrote somewhere that the God who comes to us in the crucified Jesus is “weak in power but strong in love.” That’s what the judgment Jesus spoke of makes plain. The all-powerful, self-sufficient God that humans desire is not who God is willing to be. God, as Jesus also said, is love. That’s his very nature. Real love makes itself vulnerable because it opens itself up to the one it loves. It is willing to put itself at risk for the sake of those it loves. Love abandons power and security; it’s willing to become weak, to suffer, even to be humbled and die, for the sake of the beloved. A vulnerable God is not what human beings desire, but he is precisely what we need: a God capable of giving himself completely, a God capable of putting himself in our place, becoming subject to sin and death, even willing to be condemned and forsaken by all the powers of the world that stand for all that is right and good.
Who, in the last judgment that was the cross of Christ, God is revealed to be stands in the sharpest possible contrast with what all we who condemned him are revealed to be. God who was utterly complete and self-sufficient reaches out, giving himself to us, taking every risk, paying every price, to make us his own. The Hebrew scriptures speak of the “crookedness” of fallen human beings; the Medievals used to translate this with the Latin phrase incurvitas in se: ‘curved in upon oneself’. They saw human beings as folded in upon themselves, incapable of self-giving, self-sharing, even -- and above all -- sealed up and shutting off God in a delusion of self-sufficiency absurd for creatures whose very life is nothing but complete dependence upon, and loving trust in, the creator.
There’s a poem by Scott Cairns in the tradition of the Rabbinic Midrashes on biblical texts. This one, called “The Entrance of Sin,” (in The Recovered Body) speculates on what really happened in the Garden of Eden. Part of it goes:
...sin had made its entrance long before the serpent spoke, long before the woman and the man had set their teeth on the pale, stringy flesh which was, it turns out, also quite without flavor. Rather, sin had come in the midst of an evening stroll, when the woman had reached to take the man’s hand and he withheld it.
In this way, the beginning of our trouble came to the garden almost without notice. And in later days, as the man and the woman wandered idly about their paradise, as they continued to enjoy the sensual pleasures of food and drink and spirited coupling, even as they sat marveling at the approach of evening and the more lush approach of sleep, they found within themselves a developing habit of resistance.
One supposes that even then, this new taste for turning away might have been overcome, but that is assuming the two had found the result unpleasant. The beginning of loss was this: every time some manner of beauty was offered and declined, the subsequent isolation each conceived was irresistible.
That, it seems to me, is how it is with the likes of us; there’s more there about the true human condition, about our sin and need, than I ever heard in Sunday school or that we hear today from religious moralists. In our deathly pride we are cut off from one another and from the God who can save us only by coming to us in scandalous freedom, in the openness of self-giving love. Only that can break us open, soften hardened hearts, and save us. It is near inevitable that the encounter of such a God and such creatures leads to the last judgment, to that death on that cross. The God of uncompromising love lets his creatures have their own way. The death Jesus faces in John’s Gospel is the final, terrible working out of the rejection of God, the betrayal of love, portrayed in the story of Adam and Eve, a story each of us has made a reality more times than anyone need count. The aim of Lenten reflection is a renewed realization of the hopelessness of our situation but for the crucified God. Yet in the end, when the crisis is reached, and we’ve done our worst, it is the power of the love of the powerless God that triumphs. “The cross teaches us,” Luther wrote, “to believe in hope even when there is no hope” (Heidelberg Disputations). On that cross he will draw everyone to himself; all of us -- in the main despite ourselves -- will be counted with him in his death and made alive and healed in his resurrection.
Amen.