Reflections from The Hill – God’s Explicit Love (John 12.32)

You’ve got to feel sorry for the Greeks. I mean, they rock up to the synagogue and ask Philip if they can see Jesus. Then they get transferred to Andrew and end up being put on “Hold”.

All the while the elevator music is running, interrupted every 45 seconds or so by a recorded message assuring them that their ‘call is important to us’ and to not to hang up.

These Greeks never did get to see the One they came to see, although we know that the message was passed down the line. Perhaps they’re still on hold.

Why would someone want to do that? To see Jesus, I mean. If the context of the Reading is right, they would have heard stuff about Jesus’ impending death, set it in the framework of Moses and the Brass Serpent and hot-footed from their homes to get their peepers on The Man.

They wanted to be saved, to simply look at Jesus and live. These blokes weren’t after a parley; they just wanted a pain-free gander. What they got, in the end, was much more than they bargained for.

None of us like pain much. We live by the pleasure principle and will do whatever it takes and from whatever source to avoid it: other people, failure, risk, even truth sometimes.

You and I are practical hedonists, in the business of making pleasure and happiness a way of life, asking no more of ourselves and others than that we all have a nice day. So what can we understand of a twisted body hanging from a cross?

Some of us want to take that figure off the cross, or cover it with the data projector screen, or put a flag or a banner in front of it and proclaim that Jesus lives instead.

Others of us want to polish that cross, to give it a clear plastic coating, saving ourselves the elbow grease to keep it looking nice, and make it clean and neat and antiseptic. No pain here; no hurt. It’s best that way.

I read of one Parish that, a few years ago, put three black-draped crosses on its front lawn during Lent only to get a dozen or so phone calls complaining that these things lowered the tone of the neighbourhood and could they be taken down, please?

Suffering, either that of Jesus or humanity’s is, apparently, something that happens to other people, that it’s annoying rather than ennobling, especially if it can be easily eradicated by drugs or meditation techniques.

The fact is that it’s intellectually a bridge-too-far to connect the cross and our salvation; or to connect the suffering of Christ and the suffering of humanity or even to understand the need for God to get down and dirty with the world. (In clergy-speak, this is known as The Atonement).

The truth is that there are some things we can’t understand, which is just as well, because we aren’t saved by our understanding but by us standing under the truth, if you get my meaning.

John’s Gospel implies that the cross is not to be understood; it is simply to be gazed on, to be lifted up, to be forced on our myopic view of the world, to be held up like a poster in front of any procession which moves us toward God.

There are those did look. Francis Bernadone was one such. He was in the Church of San Damiano in Assisi, stood under the crucifix over the altar, looked at the body, cadaver-like, on the cross and heard the voice of Jesus calling him - and was saved.

Let the atonement be a dollars-and-cents-style transaction if it must, a contract between a righteous judge of a God and sinful humanity or else let it be a Christus Victor-style military coup. We can understand both.

But in the places where the gospel is made intellectually digestible in weekly doses, the crucifix, with its visible, believable, body on the cross still grabs us.

Sure, it is the work of a man’s hands but, like the craftsman who repaired the Yarrabah crucifix, it still has the power to cause more than one tear to fall because people never cease to be amazed that God’s love should be made so explicit.