It is not possible to read John’s gospel without realising that the words ‘glory’ and ‘glorify’ are important to him. In Mark’s gospel the noun appears only 3 times and the verb once. In John there are 11 uses of the noun and 18 uses of the verb. In Hebrew there are two words for glory, one meaning splendour and majesty, the other meaning heaviness or weight, something substantial. In Greek the word for glory derives from a verb meaning to form an opinion or estimate of something, so glory implies holding something in high estimation. So when we come across the words ‘glory’ and ‘glorify’ in John’s gospel we must think not only of a kind of splendour or radiance but also of the substance and significance of what is held to be glorious.
One of the most significant differences between John’s gospel and the other three is that Jesus is given a long discourse at the last supper. The discourse lasts for four substantial chapters and covers a variety of subjects. It begins just after Judas has gone out into the night to tell the high priest that Jesus can be arrested without fuss in the Garden of Gethsemane. As the door closes, Jesus says, ‘Now is the Son of Man glorified and God is glorified in him.’ It seems an odd moment to start talking about glory, the moment when the events that will lead to the cross are finally set in motion. We are used to thinking of the crucifixion with the darkness of tragedy as in Mark’s gospel, followed by the glory of the resurrection on Easter morning. But John’s gospel is telling us that the glory begins now as Judas leaves the Upper Room to betray Jesus. Clearly we are intended to look for things in this story of the crucifixion which will tell us more than we normally associate with the idea of glory.
In the discourse that Jesus now delivers to the disciples, he talks again of glory in various ways; the disciples will glorify God by bearing much fruit. This might seem ironic in that the first fruit the disciples will bear will be panic, and denial. Next Jesus shows that when the Spirit of truth comes he will glorify Jesus by declaring to the disciples what belongs to Jesus. The Spirit will therefore be showing God to the disciples through Jesus because Jesus represents the Father wholly. This is a signal that paradoxically we are to find God hidden in everything that follows. And finally Jesus prays that in this hour the Father will glorify the Son so that the Son may glorify the Father, because God has given the Son power over all flesh to give eternal life or not. Again this is a signal as to how to read what is to come. The meaning of power according to Jesus will be displayed as it comes up against the power of Rome. Jesus in his encounters with the people of the passion will either in some way give them eternal life or not.
Jesus and the disciples leave the Upper Room and go to the garden of Gethsemane. John’s account of Jesus’ agony in the garden is reduced to a question which troubles Jesus. Should he pray to be saved from this hour? To which he replies, ‘No for this purpose I have come to this hour.’ The whole meaning of Jesus life is contained in this symbolic hour.
The great test of what Jesus means by power is encountered in the trial before Pilate. John’s account of this trial has a different purpose to that of the other gospels. Its primary intention is not to show that Jesus and therefore his followers are innocent of any crimes against the state. Nor is John intending to create a favourable image of Pilate, who here comes across as flippant, petulant, and self serving. Pilate asks Jesus if he is a king, and Jesus replies that his authority is not the kind to be fought for, his power is the kind that cannot and should not be defended by violence. His authority comes from his task of embodying the truth. And so Pilate asks the most famous question in the New Testament, ‘What is truth?’ He asks it dismissively, jestingly not expecting an answer. He asks it with the flippancy of all those who think that questions about the truth are irrelevant to practical living; Pilate’s is a ‘what you see is what you get’ attitude, an assumption that all you need to know is obvious. Pilate will not take seriously anyone who tries to take the complexity of words seriously.
Words are to be taken seriously and the person using those words is to be taken equally seriously. Your capacity to speak the truth is inseparably bound up with what kind of person you are. The truth Jesus speaks can only be seen as true by the kind of person who already has a moral and spiritual commitment to this quest for truth – a truth which is more of course than the truth or falsity of statements about the material world. The truth that goes with the kind of power Jesus has is a truth which can only invite attention; it cannot be imposed, or fought for or even proved in argument. It is a truth proved only by the fruits of a life time of seeking, listening, hoping, and loving. The environment in which you discover this truth, is established by attending to the words and acts of Jesus. Such truth is, of course, fraught with danger in the kind of world we live in because it can make no use of the worldly tools of persuasion, power or politics. Such truth has no defence against such things. Pilate is finding it hard to know what to punish Jesus for but for the sake of his own position he orders Jesus to be crucified pretending that the decision isn’t his; by a subtle piece of political manoeuvring he allows the crowd to think they have power when they don’t. And in that process the truth of Jesus is isolated and left silent.
Pilate’s political game play has also included a piece of deeply ironic theatre. Jesus is dressed in a purple robe and a crown of thorns and presented to the crowd with the words, ‘Behold the man!’ For Pilate this may be the equivalent of saying, ‘Look at the poor fellow, what sort of threat can he be to any of us. Why on earth do you take him so seriously’. And yet if this is the hour of Jesus’ glory, the statement can have an entirely different connotation for the followers of Jesus. ‘Behold, the man! – look if you can see it, at the embodiment of humanity in whom the truth, the power and the glory of God are to be found.’ And unless you can find your humanity in this man, you will never know eternal life and eternal life means therefore a very distinctive kind of freedom; and that is a freedom to be at home in a world where the choices you make may always be wrong, where you will be hurt and misunderstood, where you may never find true love, where you may never feel you have fulfilled your potential; that is a freedom to be at home in a world where you can trust that when you have done your best humbly and lovingly to witness to the truth, the truth will ultimately look after itself without your having to defend it. It is that kind of freedom which enables us to glimpse the eternal life Jesus promised his disciples. Such freedom is desperately hard to attain. Whenever we are confronted by threats to what we hold most dear, whenever we hear someone mocking our beliefs, or challenging them with detailed argument, whenever someone seems to be attacking our integrity, we feel we must go on the offensive, we defend ourselves, we feel antagonised and if we cannot fight back and win the argument we feel frustrated and belittled. Did Jesus feel anything like that as the high priest demanded that he justify himself, provide explanations, prove himself; did he long to explain the truth to doubting Pilate? It would seem not. The truth in him would not, could not allow that kind of response or retaliation. The place he had been put in was not a place he could contest; what he had to do was give himself wholly to a situation over which he had no control. In a situation in which he is made to seem wholly passive – that is his action – to give himself willingly to what his opponents will do to him; he gives himself to the cross. And so we begin to see again that it isn’t just that the cross prepares the way for the glory of Easter – the cross is part of the glory.
Jesus reveals to us the capacity of our humanity for glory. Even when betrayed, denied, falsely accused and wrongfully condemned; even when scourged, mocked, abandoned and crucified, there is still something in our humanity which survives when love is the motive for enduring all this. The love with which Jesus washed the disciples feet and then said to them, ‘If I your Lord and teacher have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. A new commandment I give you that you love one another even as I have loved you. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’
On the cross there is one last signal of this love given in this gospel and not in the others, when seeing his mother and the disciple who was closest to him Jesus says, ‘Woman behold your Son – behold your mother.’ What does that familiar phrase really mean? Of course the beloved disciple can’t be a substitute for Mary’s own son; and the beloved disciple will not care for her as his mother but as the mother of Jesus. They are to try to love one another as Jesus has loved each of them. Even as he is dying Jesus still tries to create that kind of love in the world. It is what he truly thirsts for and it is what as this hour comes to its end enables him to say, It is finished – it is accomplished. He has seen this love through to the end.
It might seem that as we have studied each of the Gospel accounts the darkness has somehow lightened, John makes no mention of the darkness which the other three accounts describe as descending on Golgotha between midday and three in the afternoon. Mark’s Jesus dies alone and in the darkness of defeat. Matthew’s Jesus dies tragically rejected by his own people and as the focus of a fierce division which will lead to centuries of cruel and violent anti-semitism; Luke’s Jesus dies as a model of the forgiving martyr who finds companionship even in death; and John’s Jesus reveals the glory of a truth and a love which is vindicated in and through defeat.
Each in their own way reveals the cross as the hiding place of God’s power, that power which Paul describes as a foolishness which is wiser that human wisdom, and a weakness which is stronger than human strength. Again the paradoxes roll out because somehow it is only by putting contradictions together that we seem to be able to arrive at the deepest truths. Paradox shakes our minds out of thinking conventionally. Paradox startles us into a new way of thinking. We can perhaps only talk about God in paradoxes because of the ultimate paradox of trying to express the inexpressible in words, of trying to make the ultimate mystery knowable. God’s world is a baffling place and cannot be reduced to formulae and definition. It is only by putting together words like crucifixion and glory, wisdom and foolishness, power and weakness that we begin to glimpse something more profound than conventional thinking. Through paradoxes such as these we are called to explore the depths of the encounter between God and human need and nature. Through the cross we begin to discover that whatever I am, I am not what I think myself to be. Only by giving up myself do I find myself, only by dying do I truly live. Only by seeing the cross as the hiding place of God’s power can we call this Friday Good. Amen.