Readings:
Sermon:
Paradox is at the heart of the Christian message – seemingly contradictory ideas find harmony in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The central paradox of the Christian gospel, one you are hopefully familiar with, is how death produces life! This scene in John 12:20-33 is the turning point for Jesus, where he proclaims that his time has now come (v23).
Jesus describes how a kernel of wheat needs to be planted in the soil and to die for it to grow and multiply and bear ‘much fruit’ (v24). Jesus is well aware that his vocation is to lay down his life in obedience to his Father. Jesus is well aware that only through his death will the hope and reality of God’s salvation reach the four corners of the world for all to hear. Only through his death can new life, eternal life, be a possibility. The sacrificial, self-emptying, and obedient shape of Jesus’ ministry also becomes the shape of Christian discipleship, “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also.”
This is what we are called to today. Jesus’ expectations have not changed. Commitment to Jesus is not easy, discipleship is not merely a form of therapy or self-help. The way we become followers of Jesus, the way we RSVP to God’s invitation to eternal life, begins by denying ourselves, setting aside our desires and preferences to follow in Jesus’ footsteps, living lives that are at odds with worldly ideologies and practices, living lives of faithful obedience to God’s word.
This is how we experience ‘much fruit’. The New Living Translation phrases this verse as a ‘plentiful harvest of new lives’ (v24 NLT). I don’t know about you, but I want to see a plentiful harvest of new lives. I want to see our local churches grow and thrive. I want to see my life and the lives of my brothers and sisters in Christ bearing fruit. I want to see this kind of exponential Kingdom growth. The vision of our diocese is to be Kingdom People. We cannot be Kingdom People unless we are people willing to lose ourselves in obedience to Jesus. We will not see our churches growing and flourishing if we are not modelling this paradoxical vocation of the church. We will not see life if we do not embrace death.
I am convinced that the church in our nation needs a radical reawakening, a big slap-in-the-face moment. For decades, perhaps centuries, we have been submerged in a culture that does not want to conceive anything beyond the measurable, physical, material, and scientific. Our Western world is constantly telling us that if something cannot be understood or witnessed through our physical senses then it does not exist. But people are thirsting for more. I see this week in and week out in pastoral ministry.
Reducing God, reducing the gospel to a rational idea is foolish and ineffective. God cannot be contained; the gospel cannot be restrained. We cannot manage church attendance, we cannot control the success of our ministry. This is all the wonderful and miraculous prerogative of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. What we can do, what we are invited into, is to participate in the ministry of Jesus, through faith, prayer, and obedience. What we can expect is that through our self-emptying and maturing as disciples of Jesus, the transcendent God will do the heavy lifting: the convicting, the nurturing, and the outpouring of signs and wonders. We see this in verses 29-30, where the voice of the Father thundered from heaven leaving people awestruck. This is the kind of wake-up call the church needs today: to break free from the straitjacket of immanency that produces fear, doubt, that makes us default to worldly strategies and leads us to compromise the truth we have inherited.
What does this mean for you today? What does this mean for your local church?
Let me leave you with the blessing at the end of the book of Hebrews:
Now may the God of peace—
who brought up from the dead our Lord Jesus,
the great Shepherd of the sheep,
and ratified an eternal covenant with his blood—
may he equip you with all you need
for doing his will.
May he produce in you,
through the power of Jesus Christ,
every good thing that is pleasing to him.
All glory to him forever and ever! Amen.