What kid doesn’t love to splash in a mud puddle? Do you remember the squeal of delight as the wet, dirt-filled explosion splattered all over you? For how many of us was our first “culinary” experience creating mud pies — artfully decorated mud balls, frosted and festooned with leaves, grass, and weeds?
But for most of us the love of mud quickly fades as we grow up. The biggest “tell” for this dirt aversion have you ever gotten invited by a friend to come and spend an evening at their “pottery class?” Have you ever accepted? Yeah. We really don’t like mud any more after a certain age.
Except. If you ever saw the weird, but romantic, classic movie “Ghost.” Demi Moore plays an artist. She sculpts, she paints, she works with clay. When her sweetheart, played by Patrick Swayze, joins her at the potter’s wheel while she is creating a new piece of art, the loving relationship between the clay and the artist is much more than making mud pies. The spinning, shape-shifting clay becomes a celebration of their life and the love they share.
Being a Christian is not a “something-to-do-on-Thursday-night” pottery class. Being a Christian means being the product of a lifelong creative process that is fueled by divine love and the Christ-formation in us of commitment, compassion, and sacrifice. The most miraculous culmination of that potter’s wheel process is introduced in this week’s gospel text — the final glorification of Jesus.
There is nothing “weak” in this week’s text. The message Jesus offers, as he enters into Jerusalem and into the final phase of his earthly ministry, is all about being strong even as the world sees Jesus as being broken.
This week’s text starts with some Greeks coming to Philip (whose own name is Greek in origin — so he is a “brother”) and a known disciple of Jesus. These Greeks ask Philip “we wish to see Jesus.” This “see” (“eidon”) is not just a request to hang out with a new teacher. It is a hope to “see” truly the essence of Jesus, to experience Jesus as the one sent by God. These Greeks were “God-fearers,” Gentiles who were not “officially” Jewish, but who tried to live according to Jewish Torah faith. This was not an easy task, as they were Gentiles living in culture devoted to a pantheon of pagan gods.
The arrival of the Gentiles who wish to “see” is Jesus’ signal to announce a new phase in his ministry. Jesus declares, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” According to the “rules” of this world, a moment of “glory” is a moment of pure triumph, of success, of honor. For the world glorification is winning the Super Bowl, sailing undefeated through “March Madness,” investing in something small and watching it go global like Facebook.
The gospel definition of “glorification” is something quite different. Even the opposite. According to God’s providence for the redemption of this world, the moment of Jesus’ “glorification” is also the moment when — according to the world — his star isn’t rising, it is becoming a black hole. As these new Gentile inquirers come truly to “see” Jesus as the Son of Man, the Redeemer sent by God, Jesus knows it is time to “pull the plug” on his worldly ministry. It is now time to walk towards the Cross and the fulfillment of a mission that embraces all present and future generations of faithful forever. Jesus’ “glorification” takes guts and appears nuts to the world’s understanding of “glory.”
The pilgrimage of Christian faith has been “theologized” into three modes: Justification, Sanctification, and Glorification. These are big terms about big ideas that lead to big confusion. In this week’s text from John, however, we see all three of these “theological” concepts made real in the life of Jesus and the lives of all his followers — disciples of the first century and also disciples of the twenty-first century.
Justification is when we submit ourselves to the unknowable future that God has planned. For the Greek Gentiles who came to ask to “see” Jesus, that was the moment of their justification. They were willing to submit themselves to an unknown providence. They were willing to submit the clay of their lives to the sculpturing of God. They were willing to put themselves onto the potter’s hands and onto the potter’s wheel. They were willing to be “spun” according to God’s purposes. This first moment of truly “seeing” Jesus is their experience of justification. It is the moment when the truth of Jesus’ life and mission are embraced and the “rules” of success and failure in this world are once and for all turned upside down.
Sanctification is all about keeping your soul wet, keeping your “clay” moist, keeping your life of faith pliable to the Potter’s touch. It is not enough just to believe and offer your life to the master potter. For if you dry up and your clay becomes hard and brittle, no creative shaping of your life is possible. Sanctification is a life-long commitment to keeping your clay moist, staying receptive to God’s shaping and reshaping. Sanctification is an ongoing spinning on the wheel, acceptance of new pressures and possibilities. Your first commitment to God has already been made. You are justified, you have accepted your status as clay — as a life that can be used and utilized by the divine. Sanctification begins the moment of justification, the moment you have submitted yourself to God’s potter’s wheel.
We have all met people whose clay has grown dry and hard. Whether it is personal loss, or spiritual laziness, or unfulfilled longing — something starts sucking the moisture out of our malleability. Without daily applications of moisturizer, we become brittle and unable to change, or re-form, or adapt.
But “dried up” souls are not terminal. As every potter knows, all clay is capable of being re-infused with life, once again made able to be shaped, if new water is reintroduced to the hardened soil. Our openness to God’s hand in our lives is what gives us our ability to keep Christ forming in us. The old Quaker hymn “Tis the Gift to be Simple” extolls the “gift” being able to “turn” — like clay on a potter’s wheel. We “keep turning, turning, ‘til we come round right.”
But the hope for clay’s continual shaping and remolding ends when the clay is “fired.” When the “firing” of the clay is done, the vessel is fixed. Clay can be reformed and transformed on the potter’s wheel until it is time for the firing. Then the clay is put into the kiln and exposed to rigors of a burning fire and super-heated air. Whatever “shape” the clay has been shaped into by the master is now fully and finally fixed, baked into a set shape forever.
All disciples, all of us who give over our lives to being disciples’ of Christ, all of us who willingly put our lives on the potter’s wheel, will eventually come to a moment of being “fired.” Jesus was “glorified” when he was lifted up on the cross, when he died on the cross out of God’s love for this world and his personal expression of that love.
Jesus’ life, his mission, his ministry, was finally “fired,” finally “glorified” on the Cross. It was not a worldly moment of glory. It was a worldly moment of defeat. But it was a divine moment of victory, of glorification. It was not the works and worries of the Roman and Jewish conductors of events that turned a “defeat” into a triumph. Jesus “glorified” God by being “lifted up” on the cross. Jesus was lifted up on the cross as a criminal, but he was lifted up by the power of God’s love as the savior of the world.
Golgotha, Aramaic for “The Skull,” was a place of infamy. And this was when "infamy" was not equated with celebrity. Golgotha was a small hill just outside the walls of ancient Jerusalem near a well-traveled highway.
Everyone equated the name Golgotha with the termination zone for the wickedest and the worst, as judged by Roman law and society. In the Jewish mind, to be “hung on a tree” was to be cursed by God: “for anyone who is hung is cursed in the sight of God.” (Deuteronomy 21:22-23). But the very “curse” of the cross would be the place where the serpent’s curse was crushed. In Genesis 3:15 we read “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” In John 3:14 we read,
“Just as Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” As the Son of God was “lifted up” at Golgatha, the place of the skull, so the skull of the serpent was crushed and the curse was lifted. At that moment, Jesus was glorified.
What the world counted as defeat, God turned to glory.
This is the way it is with God. At the moment of your greatest defeat and despair, at the moments of life’s greatest “firings,” God wants to show you the way to glorification. Of course, our ultimate glorification will come when God speaks these words to each one of us: “Come Home.” But until then keep submitting yourself to the Master Potter, keep your clay moist, and trust the Master Potter to mold you and shape you into a glorified state of beauty and wholeness and truth. God wants to do God’s greatest blessings in your life, not at your moments of victory as the world defines victory, but at your moments of greatest faith, even when that faith seems to get you lifted up for ridicule and scorn.
Who can forget the images of those 21 Coptic Christians who were beheaded by ISIS in Libya. All wearing orange jumpsuits, being lined up and beheaded on a beach, the video sent to the world under the title “A Message Signed With Blood to the Nation of the Cross.” Their only words were “Jesus, help me.” In the eyes of the world, these kidnapped Christians were defeated by ISIS. But their moment of greatest defeat was their moment of glorification. Let us pray for all Christians in this part of the world, and may our faith continue to submit to the Master’s Touch, and the Potter’s Wheel. May the beauty of your vessel be such that we can say with Aaron,
May the Lord bless you and keep you,
May the Lord lift his face upon you and be gracious unto you,
May God’s face radiate with joy because of you.