This Won’t Do (things we need to let die)

Brad Sullivan

Holy Monday, Year C

March 21, 2016

Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, Bay City, TX

John 12:1-11

This Won’t Do (things we need to let die)

In the sardonic, silly, and hilarious series of books, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams, wrote a science fiction tale beginning on Earth which was quickly demolished to make way for an interstellar highway.  The one survivor from earth is then taken on a journey across time and space to the far reaches of the universes, and much hilarity ensues.  On one of the fictional planets Douglas Adams describes, the people were peaceful and loving, until the fateful day in which a spaceship from another world crash landed onto their planet.  Until this moment, they had no idea there were any other planets or stars for that matter.  Their atmosphere was surrounded by a cloud of dust which blocked from view any other stars or celestial bodies.  The spaceship punched a hole in their dust cloud, and for the first time, they saw the stars and the enormity of space beyond them.

Upon discovering that they were not alone in all of creation, they, as a people, uttered three words.  “This won’t do.”  Their understanding of life, the universe, and everything, had been irrevocably altered, and so they decided to annihilate the entire universe.  They eventually failed, but not before unleashing unimaginable carnage to the universe in an enormous intra-galactic war.  Did I mention these books were comedy and rather sardonic.  The people of this planet chose to destroy the truth rather than let die their old understanding and allow the truth to change them.

That sounds a bit like the chief priests’ reaction to Jesus.  Here Jesus was raising people from the dead, claiming things about himself and about God that didn’t mesh with their understanding of Judaism or their understanding of God, and rather than learn from Jesus or at least leave him be, they decided to kill not only him, but evidence of his good deeds, plotting to kill Lazarus, whom Jesus had raised from the dead.  Their universe had changed and they looked at one another and said, “This won’t do.” 

To be fair, they weren’t trying to kill God.  They didn’t know or believe that Jesus was God, but had they believed, I wonder how different their reaction would have been.  Possibly not murderous, but still at least profoundly argumentative. 

Jesus was God incarnate.  For millennia, the people of Israel had wondered and marveled at the mystery of God.  They had the words of scripture to describe God and the way of life given in Torah for them to live out God’s ways, and yet, they saw in a mirror dimly. 

Suddenly, God was a human being, living out a human life, and that human life often didn’t jive with what they believed God to be, nor did Jesus jive with what they believed they were supposed to be.  Jesus simply wouldn’t do.

Jesus has a way of bringing about such a reaction, to think, “This just won’t do.”  Even for those of us, who have known Jesus and believe him to be both God and human, we often look at his life and teachings and compare them to our own lives and think, “this won’t do.”  Just as the chief priests, we too see in a mirror dimly, Jesus challenges us time after time about who God is and who we are. 

We have various ideas about what it means to be a man or be a woman in this country.  There are a variety of proofs of what it means to be a man, many of them centering about strength, physical prowess, control, or even mental acuity and accomplishment of something great.  Likewise, there are a variety of proofs of what it means to be a woman, having to do with femininity, attractiveness, fertility, as well as physical prowess, and skill in just about everything.

None of us live up to these feminine and masculine ideals, not even those who seem to, and yet we often keep some measure of these ideas of what it means to be a man or a woman in our minds:  thoughts of who and how we ought to be. 

Then we look to Jesus, to God incarnate, who shows us what it means to be truly human, and he challenges most of our masculine and feminine ideas.  Power?  No, humility.  Continual self-improvement?  No, dying to self.  Giving or getting what we deserve?  No, grace and forgiveness. 

When we truly look at Jesus, at God incarnate, at true humanity, and we compare him to who we are and how we want to be, we are continually called up short, and rather than let die that which needs to die within us, we often tacitly respond with, “This won’t do.”   We then seek not to kill Jesus, but to dismiss that teaching of his or that aspect of who he is, and thereby, we seek kinda to kill Jesus rather than let die that part of us that doesn’t mesh with Jesus. 

Thankfully, in the incarnation, Jesus not only showed who God truly is and who we truly are meant to be, Jesus took upon himself all of our failings.  He united himself to us, not only as we are meant to be, but as we are.  As Paul reminds us in Romans 8:38-39, “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

That is the incarnation, the fact that nothing, nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, not even our own desires to say, “This won’t do.”  Jesus’ incarnation has united us to him forever, and that union with God is then constantly pulling us, not forward as we would think of it, not to be better or do more.  Jesus’ incarnation is constantly pulling us toward the cross, leading us to let die those parts of us that need to die so that he can then reform us and remake us in his image, so that he can make us into true men, make us into true women.  Jesus is like that spaceship from another world bursting through the cloud of dust that obscures our vision and understanding of ourselves and inviting us to the beauty of what lies beyond, the enormity and beauty of God’s love.  Amen.

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