GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD...WHEN I AM LIFTED UP

FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT "B"

God so loved the World….    When I am lifted up (Jn 3,16….)

Suffering = love = glory = God

When Jesus speaks in John’s gospel he often makes it easy to misunderstand him. Nicodemus, for example, gets mocked by Jesus for having difficulty figuring out, for example, how a grown man can be born again. Today, Jesus does it again, saying one thing but meaning more than folks would catch at first hearing. When Jesus says he will be lifted up, the expectation is that he is describing some sort of glorification. “I - once I am lifted up from the earth – will draw all to myself.” After all, the passage begins with his declaration that “the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” It sounds encouraging. Jesus will be lifted up from the earth to something better, and we will be drawn to him there. Good news, but the wrong message. John “lets the beans out of the bag” by telling us that Jesus is actually talking about the way he will die, lifted up from the earth on a cross. Do I really want to be drawn to him there? The paradox is that both understandings of what Jesus says are correct. For John the crucifixion is the glorification of Christ, and his glorification is inseparable from the Cross. How can that be? How can death by torture be glory? Holy Week is the time to think about the puzzle of John’s equating death and glory. Theoretically, Jesus could have saved us by doing something other than dying; sharing intellectual or spiritual enlightenment would have been easier for us to handle. Let’s start by thinking about glory. We may not be sure what it is, but (aside from John’s equating it with the Cross), we think that, on the whole, it’s more pleasant than being tortured. It’s hard to describe glory since we have not experienced it fully. However, we have all had moments that have seemed close enough to the real thing to give us a hint of what glory is. Over the centuries, we have used light, halos, trumpets, anthems, dances and ecstasies to describe it. To put it prosaically, glory is the experience of being embraced by God’s overwhelming love. That love has no limit. Time, sin and death cannot overcome it. It’s a love by which God gives life in all its richness. When I intuit it or, like a contemplative, experience it directly, I am transformed, transported with a joy so great that it can feel like pain. But can I trust it? How can I be sure of it? After all, I will die. Even before that happens, I feel the love of God less often and less intensely than I feel its seeming absence. Believing in it doesn’t make my life any easier. It certainly doesn’t make me a nicer person. So, is the love of God that the Church proclaims real? This is where John’s insight that the Cross is the glorification of Christ gives comforting assurance. Even in his death that seemed as far as possible from the love of God or anyone else, Jesus was in glory because he was embraced by God’s love and showing the nature of God’s love. God’s is a crucified love. It is so completely self-giving as to be self-immolation, the death of God. In John’s account of the Last Supper, Jesus says there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. On the Cross that is what God does. The Eternal God dies of love. The ultimate example of the presence of God’s love, the ultimate glory is, indeed, the Cross. So Jesus can say that in being lifted up on the Cross he will draw all to himself in glory. And what of us? At Easter we will renew our baptismal union with the death of Christ. Jesus says that unless a grain of wheat fall to the earth and die, it remains merely a grain. It will certainly die. In various ways I have suffered and will suffer. Can I believe that even in these experiences, I am embraced by the love of God, that I am in glory? That is one of the things Lenten practices should be teaching me in a low key way. In deprivation, privation, suffering and death I am embraced by God. In those experiences, I am, in fact, most closely embraced by God, because they are the times I can be most like God whose love is a suffering love.