Suddenly, we are a week ahead of our Lenten schedule. This story belongs to the Week of the Passion of our Lord, because it occurs sometime between the days we call Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday. It was during that interval that a group of Gentiles, who were simply called Greeks, approached Philip with the request to see Jesus. Jesus must have been in some sort of seclusion pondering, no doubt, what was about to happen to him. His retort to Philip and Andrew, when he heard the request, certainly suggests that he has been making a life or death decision - and he has chosen to die. Just think about that today, and throughout the remainder of Lent. No one was going to take his life from him; Jesus was about to lay it down to carry out and fulfill God’s plan to reconcile people to himself.
A sign of our times appeared in recent newspaper headlines: "Doctors’ dilemma: The ethics of not prolonging life." Benjamin Weiser, a Washington Post reporter, wrote: "For eight weeks in 1979, Frederick Schwab, a 25-year-old medical student training in a Pennsylvania hospital cancer ward, braced himself each time he entered the rooms of his five dying patients. Especially Sarah’s." Sarah was dying a slow, painful death. "Her tiny, darkened room smelled of decay. Her pain seemed the worst. Her cheeks were sunken. She lay motionless in her bed, staring at the ceiling, whimpering as Schwab gingerly searched for one more vein from which to draw blood." Weiser says, "It wasn’t until the ninth week, Schwab recalls, that he saw a strip of yellow tape on her door." It had been there all along, but Schwab had not noticed it. The nurse whom he asked about it told him that it was a "no code" sign, and that "no code patients were not to be saved when their hearts stopped or their lungs failed. A decision had been made in advance," she said, "that the hospital resuscitation team, called the ‘code team,’ was not to be summoned."1 No one had ever told him about that. Schwab, almost by accident, learned that not all patients receive the full benefit of medical knowledge; those who are terminally ill may be allowed to die. A life-and-death decision has been made for them; their ultimate fate has been taken out of their hands. That is the "doctors’ dilemma": who should be kept alive and who should be permitted to die without employing extraordinary means to keep them alive a bit longer?
Jesus faced no such dilemma. The choice was his to make, not that of others. Not Herod’s, not Caiaphas’, not the other priests’ - it was his to determine his own fate when he was in the very prime of life. Only by dying (there was no other way) could the Father’s purpose for him and his life be completed. There was no other option, and, in this scene, it is evident that Jesus has made his decision. He will die as a common criminal, hanged upon a tree.
What happened to the Greeks and their request to see Jesus? We’ll never know whether he granted it and met with them, or not. But that’s not what is important today. The end is at hand. Jesus is soon to die and he wants his disciples to understand why he will allow death to overtake him. Jesus’ death on the cross is God’s radical way of "bringing forth fruit"; that is, turning his people away from sin and death and back to himself. Jesus taught with authority, and many listened and were convinced that the kingdom of God was indeed at hand. He worked many wonders and signs, and many believed that he was the Son of God, the Promised One. But the ultimate evidence of divine power and purpose in Jesus Christ was concentrated in his death and his resurrection. That was why he would lay down his life in perfect obedience and selflessness - that others might be saved for the Father through his love.
Ellen Goodman wrote a column at the beginning of this decade titled, "Survivalism: Giving up on humanity." She believes that the 70s were the era of "Self-Improvement," but that the 80s will be the years of "Self-Preservation." "Yes, indeed, fellow trendwatchers," she predicted, "the true religion of the decade is not going to be EST or evangelical, it’s going to be Survival. Already 50,000 self-proclaimed Survivalists from coast to coast are hunkering down for the Apocalypse. They aren’t preparing their souls to meet doom, they are preparing their bunkers to escape it." Goodman believes that what the hot tub was to the 70s, the bunker will be for the 80s - "the emotional escape hatch" to help people face the reality of the Bomb and the possibility of nuclear annihilation. She says, "Frankly, I’m spooked by the people who are sure The End is At Hand ... for everyone else ... While the rest of us try to solve problems, they put their money on the collapse. They bet it won’t be the righteous but the selfish who inherit the earth ... It’s the same old pathetic preaching of humanity’s defeat."2
Death is the enemy - always - except for Jesus Christ, who turned death into a friend through his own death outside the walls of Jerusalem. Alfred Lord Tennyson could only have been talking about Christ when he wrote:
He fought his doubts and gathered strength,
He would not make his judgment blind,
He faced the specters of the mind
And laid them; thus he came at length
To find a stronger faith his own,
And Power was with him in the night,
Which makes the darkness and the light,
And dwells not in the light alone.
Jesus knew that the Father would see him through that terrifying experience, not merely so that he could die courageously and heroically, but so that new life might burst forth all over the earth when God would vindicate him by raising him up on the third day. That’s how all people are to benefit by the death of Jesus Christ.
When Count Nicholas Zinzendorf was a young man, he had an experience in an art gallery that changed his life forever. He was born an aristocrat and had always known wealth and luxury, and he was an extremely gifted individual. Zinzendorf had been reared and trained for a diplomatic career in the Court at Dresden. Beyond all of this, it has been said of him that he was a child of God. One day, on a trip to Paris, he stopped for a rest in Dusseldorf; during his stay in the city, he visited the art gallery. There he caught sight of Sternberg’s painting of the crucified Jesus that he calls "Ecce Homo." The artist had written two short lines in Latin beneath the painting:
Hoc feci pro te:
Quid facid pro me?
("This is what I did for you: what have you done for me?")
As the story goes, when his eyes met the eyes of the thorn-crowned Savior, he was filled with a sense of shame. He could not answer that question in a manner which would satisfy his own conscience. He stayed there for hours, looking at the painting of the Christ on the cross until the light failed. And when the time arrived for the gallery to be closed, he was still staring at the face of Christ, trying in vain to find an answer to the question of what he had done for Christ. He left the gallery at nightfall, but a new day was dawning for him. From that day on, he devoted his heart and soul, his life and his wealth - all that he had - to Christ, declaring, "I have but one passion; it is Jesus, Jesus only."3 The sight of the crucified One "high and lifted up" on the Tree made a sudden and permanent change in his life, and the resurrection bore fruit then and there in his heart and soul.
So it is, then, that the crucified Jesus "draws all people to himself" - because the cross concentrates the love and mercy of God the Father into one tremendous event, Jesus’ death and resurrection. It is not simply the crucified Jesus who draws people to himself; they would be attracted simply by his unselfishness and his humanitarian motives alone. But it is by the combination - death and resurrection, another "lifting up" by God this time - that Gentiles as well as Jews and all the people of the world can see Jesus. That’s why, it seems to me, that we need two radically different classes of crosses; one category will have a body on it - the dying or dead Christ, while the other will be the plain cross, symbol of the resurrection of our Lord. That’s why the Christus Victor cross came into use - with the living, vested, Christ-of-Easter superimposed upon it.
Not very long ago, I preached to a congregation in a contemporary church building I had never seen before. Just before I entered the pulpit, I happened to look up toward one of the wide wooden arches supporting the roof and was startled to see the shadow of the cross reflected upon it. At first, I didn’t realize what was happening, but I looked up toward a clerestory window near the roof and discovered that a cross had been built into the middle of it. The morning sun cast the shadow of the cross onto that arch and, later, it fell on the pews and the people in them. I wondered if it ever fell on the pulpit or the altar-table, and I realized that if and when it fell on the Table of the Lord, it would become an invisible crucifix and Christus Victor cross at once. That Tree and that Table bring us together as a believing community every week. And they invite the whole world to join us, in the name of Jesus Christ. Here is where people get to "see" Jesus - and enter into his presence for time and eternity.
Last summer, three Tibetan monks, who had traveled half way around the world to visit Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries, spent some time at St. John’s University and Monastery, Collegeville, Minnesota, less than 100 miles from my home. St. John’s was the fifth Benedictine monastery they visited - and the largest of all Benedictine communities. They were on a fact-finding mission for the Dalai Lama, which took them into homes, nursing homes, and factories, as well. Their interest in Catholicism stems from the help Roman Catholics gave them when they were forced from Tibet after the Chinese invasion of 1950; there were 760,000 monks in Tibet before that but only 300 remain there now. These three were among 400 monks who fled to India and were given sanctuary. No attempt is being made to convert them to the Roman Catholic faith, but one has to wonder what impact the death-resurrection, Tree-Tomb, faith of Christendom - and the monks they are meeting in these monasteries - will have upon them. Is it not likely that some of them will be drawn to the cross of Christ, and faith in him, through their experiences with Christians and their worship? And if they hear the good news preached and celebrated at the Table of the Lord, might they not be likely converts in spite of themselves and their faith in Buddha? "And I, if I be lifted up ..." Jesus said. These are no idle words.
And so, as we approach the climax of Lent and are soon to be confronted by the Tree and the Tomb, we take up the hymn which begins and ends with a refrain:
Lift high the cross, the love of Christ proclaim
Till all the world adore his sacred name.
And the invitation is sounded in song:
Come, Christians, follow where our captain trod,
Our king victorious, Christ, the Son of God.
Led on our way by this victorious sign,
The hosts of God in conqu’ring ranks combine.
Finally, we lift our prayer:
O Lord, once lifted on the glorious tree,
As thou hast promised, draw us all to thee.
So shall our song of triumph ever be:
Praise to the Crucified for victory!
Now, Holy Week may begin. And we will approach it and enter into the reliving of those last days in the life of Jesus Christ, singing,
Lift high the cross, the love of Christ proclaim
Till all the world adore his sacred name. 4
1. Reprinted in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, July 24, 1983.
2. Ellen Goodman’s syndicated column was published in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, November 19, 1980.
3. Weatherhead, Leslie D., Key Next Door - and Other London City Temple Sermons. (New York and Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1960).
4. Included in the Lutheran Book of Worship.