Sermon by Tom Are Jr. | March 17, 2024 | Fourth Presbyterian Church

Fifth Sunday in Lent
March 17, 2024

A Love That Is Not Parochial

Tom Are Jr.
Interim Pastor

Psalm 95:1–7
John 12:20–33

I wasn’t there, but I heard that Mark Davis made quite the to-do about his high school graduation. He ascended the stairs to the stage in the gym. He received his diploma, he shook hands with the principal and then some official from the school board, and then he walked to the other end of the stage to return to his seat. But just before he reached the stairs, he reached under his graduation gown to retrieve a catcher’s mitt. Mark had been a catcher on the baseball team. David Barnes was not the best pitcher on our team, but after this he was the most well-known. From across the gym, David fired a fastball right over the heads of the graduating class and into Mark’s catcher’s mitt. With the pop in the mitt, there was a brief moment of stunned silence, which Mark used to yell, “I’m outta here.”

If you choose to graduate like that it’s helpful to have a friend who can throw a fastball, but most of all you need a crowd. This doesn’t work without the crowd. It really didn’t matter who was in the crowd, as long as there was a crowd.

We can’t get too far into Jesus’ ministry without noticing the crowds — the nameless, often voiceless, folk who tag along or show up from time to time. Occasionally Jesus is alone, or with his disciples, but often there is a crowd. We don’t know them, but maybe, like Mark Davis’s graduation, knowing who they are doesn’t really matter.

I know it’s not Palm Sunday. That’s next week. But I trust that you can avoid being held captive by a strictly chronological engagement with Jesus’ ministry, because this passage in John’s Gospel happens just after Jesus rides triumphantly into Jerusalem. When these Greeks arrive, the echoes of hosanna still hang in the air. When Jesus rides into Jerusalem, the Pharisees complain, “Look, the whole world has gone after him.”

This is surely hyperbole. There has never been a time when the whole world followed Jesus; there has never been a time when the whole church followed Jesus. The whole world has not gone after Jesus, but what seems true is that Jesus goes after the whole world. After all, it’s John’s Gospel that says God so loved the world he gave his only Son. God so loved the world. World love is an essential trait of God.

It’s hard to love the world. It’s too big. Too foreign. Too crowded. Human love tends to be more parochial. We love closer to home. We tend to love our family, our tribe, our kin. But loving the whole world — nobody really does that.

Jesus rides into Jerusalem, and the crowds were waving palm branches. If it were not for John, Palm Sunday would be known as Branch Sunday or Limb Sunday, because the other Gospel writers just mention leafy branches. But it is John who names them palm branches. Well, that changes things. New Testament scholar Gail O’Day says. “From the Maccabean period, palm branches were symbols of national triumph and victory” (Gail O’Day, The New Interpreter’s Bible: The Gospel of John, vol. ix, p. 707). Waving a palm branch was like waving the stars and stripes.

A little history. The Maccabean Revolt occurred 250 years before John wrote his Gospel. It was a rebellion that pushed the occupying Seleucid Empire out of Jerusalem, and the Jews claimed independence for a minute. The Maccabees then purified the temple of Gentile contamination, and as they did, they carried palm branches. Palm branches became a symbol of national triumph and ethnic purity.

So those who flocked to Jesus with palm branches in their hands were hoping that Jesus would lead a revolt against the oppression of the Roman empire and restore ethnic purity to Jerusalem.

But Jesus then and now cannot be captured by nationalism. When one loves the world, to limit such love to the nation is too small. Oh, there is nothing wrong with loving your nation. It is a faithful thing to do, but it is something else altogether to assume that God’s love is somehow limited to any nation.

This is true because it’s almost impossible to have such loyalties without creating us and them. Whoever we are, we aren’t them.

I was having lunch with a friend back in Kansas City. We had known each other for more than ten years. Over our Caesar salads I asked, “How’s your family?” He said, “We are good, but I just got back from visiting my brother, and I got to tell you, his wife is crazy.” “Really?” “Oh yeah. None of us can figure her out. Of course,” he said, “she’s a Southerner, and you know how those people are.”

I said, “Yeah, I do.”

It took him a minute.

We do this all the time. We process the world in parochial fashion. We define ourselves in part by saying, “Well, we are not like them, and you know how those people are.”

Daniel Miller is a leader in what is known as the Texas Nationalist Movement, which claims to be a group of over 300,000. Their purpose is to encourage citizens of Texas to vote to secede from the United States of America. He sees himself not as an American; he’s a Texan (“The Secessionist,” The Atlantic, December 2019, p 19; “Texas Secessionist: We May Be Closer Than We Think,” Newsweek, 31 January 2024). Once you are defined by nationalism, it’s hard not to define it more and more narrowly.

In a similar fashion, there are a growing number of folks who identify as Christian Nationalists. They, in broad brush, perceive America to be a nation for Christians, a nation shaped by Christianity, and, increasingly, a nation where others, including Christians who do not share their theology, no longer belong.

When we tie God to nationalism, we make God too small. Because God loves the world. All of the world.

When Jesus rode into Jerusalem, they waved palm branches because they assumed he came in the spirit of the Maccabees — restoring political triumph and ethnic purity.

And it was then in this scene of palm-waving national glory, in a moment of spectacularly bad timing, that Greeks show up: “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip probably wanted to say, “Guys, read the room, man.” He gets Andrew. Then Andrew and Philip go to Jesus. “Uhh, there are some Greeks who wish to see you. They are, well, you know, Gentiles, and you know how those people are. They are not from around here, Jesus. What do you want us to do?”

Jesus neither sends them away nor invites them in for coffee. Jesus responds, “My hour has come.”

My hour? In John’s Gospel “the hour” is a metaphor for Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. It is a metaphor for Jesus’ ultimate work of redemption. After several times Jesus says, “My hour has not yet come. My hour has not yet come.” But when some Greeks come knocking on the door, Jesus says, “Now’s the time.” This is the moment Jesus has been waiting for.

If I understand the text, Jesus is a savior not of a nation, or a race, but of the world. The world may not be going after him, but he is here for the world, and in this passage we understand that the world is not just an unknown crowd; the world has a face.

Will Willimon was once a professor at Duke Divinity School and then later a bishop in the Methodist church in Alabama. He was once asked, “What do you miss most about teaching in the divinity school?” He thought for a moment and then said, “The admissions office.” What? “The admissions office is there to make sure everyone who gets in is pretty much like me.” He said, “In the church, we have to live with the whole world.”

This made Jesus’ followers uncomfortable. Heretofore they understood themselves to be practicing a particular kind of Judaism. The followers of Jesus were not Pharisees or Sadducees; they were certainly not Samaritans; and there was not a chance they were Gentiles — because you know how those people are.

But when the world shows up speaking Greek, Jesus makes it clear “I am here for them too.”

There is nothing parochial about his love. His love is for the whole world.

I have a younger brother Gene. He has special needs and lives in a group home in Louisiana where he is cared for by some of the most saintly people I know. A couple of years ago our whole family traveled to Natchitoches, Louisiana for Gene’s sixtieth birthday. Natchitoches is where they filmed the movie Steel Magnolias, if you have ever seen that. It’s also where my brother has called home since before that old movie was made.

During the pandemic I wrote a little book about joy. Gene asked me, “Brother,” — or Bwuddah, as he says it — “Bwuddah, what’s your book about?” I said, “Well, Gene, it’s a church book.” He said, “Oh.” I said, “But Gene, I talk about you in the book.” He got quiet for a minute and then said, “My bwuddah. I can’t believe he wrote a book about me.”

“Well, Gene … that’s right.”

On his birthday, after we finished ice cream and cake, I took a copy of the book and I found the pages where I mentioned him. We sat at the kitchen table of our Airbnb, and I read to him about him from the book. He just beamed.

About an hour later I found him back at that table with the book in his hands, turning the pages. He can’t read. Not even “Go, Dog. Go!” But he can read his name. He was turning the pages looking for his name. My youngest brother, Jim, asked him, “Gene, did you find your name?” “Yes.” “Well, you should look for my name now.” Gene said, “Jimmy, the book is not about you; it’s about me!”

Now I don’t know what was going on in his unusual mind, But I hope he was feeling seen. I hope he was trusting, “I see you, Bwuddah. I can look through all the stuff that stands between you and the world. I know you walk through this town pretty invisible to most, just lost in the crowd, but I see you, and you are pretty beautiful to me.”

“Jesus, some Greeks want to see you.” And Jesus says, “I’ve been looking for them. I’ve been waiting for them. I’ve had my eye on the horizon all this time.”

Because with God there are no nameless crowds, there are just children; no unknown masses, just family. With God, everyone is seen.

We know we can’t be who we are without God. But remarkably, it seems God refuses to be who God is without us … all of us.