Hello, and welcome to a new week of the STC podcast. My name is Casey Strine, I’m a member of the STC staff, and I’m excited to be sharing a few of my reflections on the Gospel of John with you this week.

This week we will be looking at materials from chapters 12, 13, and 14 of the Gospel according to John. This section of the Gospel of John is unique among the four gospels. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, there is a short description of Jesus’ last meal with his closest disciples and his institution of what you may know as Holy Communion, sometimes called the Eucharist, in which bread and wine represent Jesus’ body and blood so that people can remember his sacrifice for them. John, by contrast, gives us a lengthy recollection of Jesus’ final conversations – plural – with his closest disciples during his last night with them. Our passages this week include Jesus’ final public conversation (in chapter 12) and a small portion of the conversations he has with his closest disciples that begin in John 13 and run all the way to the middle of John 18. These passages are filled with the ideas Jesus wants to ensure his closest followers understand before his death because they are the concepts on which God will build a movement of people following Jesus and seeking to complete his mission.

Today, we will look at John 12, verses 20 to 50, and we’ll see two things: first, how Jesus responds to pressure, and, second, how Jesus wants his followers to continue his public ministry.

REFLECTION:

This passage begins with some people wanting to see Jesus. In a way that is typical of John’s depiction of Jesus in this Gospel, Jesus doesn’t respond to that question, but denies the request by changing the topic. Here, Jesus openly wonders about how he should respond to the threat his life was under from those in Jerusalem who did not like what he was doing. Jesus says out loud for all to hear, “Now my soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name!” Jesus, in short, does not ask for relief, he asks for God to be glorified.

That is an astonishing thing. Jesus says without any room for confusion that it is more important that God is glorified than that his life go well. For those of you listening to this podcast that have been Christians for some time, that might not strike you as terribly shocking. It is unfortunately true that Christians can grow immune to the surprising ways that Jesus reacts to the trouble he faces – that certainly is the case for me at times. There is a certain fatigue that sets in when we are regularly reminded that Jesus put God’s glory before his own safety. We must do what we can to read this passage, and others like it, with a fresh naïveté, a sense of coming to it for the first time, and being surprised by its radical message of service to God’s mission.

For those of you listening to this podcast who aren’t Christian, your response might be that Jesus’ statement is somewhere between reckless and ridiculous. Who would say that? He can’t actually be serious? It might be nice-sounding rhetoric – the sort of thing someone says to make themselves feel better when they know some sort of pain is truly unavoidable, but not a sensible attitude to the situation. I can appreciate that. And yet, what the Gospel of John tells us is that Jesus believed so deeply that God would reconcile humanity with God through his life, death, and resurrection that this attitude made sense. As Christians, we believe that the events around Jesus’ death, the community of people who followed him after that tragic death, and the way in which this message has changed peoples’ lives for thousands of years demonstrates that Jesus was entirely sensible in this attitude – even if it remains hard to fathom.

That is a hard message to accept. Indeed,