5TH SUNDAY OF LENT (B)

Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.

Jn 12:20-33 

v. 20. Now there were some Greeks among those who had come up to worship at the feast.

It is worth noting that with the coming of the Greeks Jesus has no further dealings with Israel alone. This marks the beginning of the transition to the universality his death and resurrection is to achieve. The Greeks mentioned were not Greek-speaking Jews, but Greeks who had become proselytes (cf. Acts 8:27; 17:4 for other foreign worshippers) and would be permitted within the court of the Gentiles - where the synoptists placed the Temple Cleansing.

v. 21. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and asked him, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.”

Philip, like Andrew, had a Greek name, and, in the view of John, came from 'Galilee of the Gentiles', though Bethsaida was really in Gaulonitis. 

To see Jesus means to seek an interview with him. Perhaps one of the things John is saying through this narrative is that until Jesus has died and risen again no one can really see him.

v. 23. Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.

Them:

Clearly Philip and Andrew. There was apparently no direct meeting with the Greeks. 

It is noteworthy that, in coming to speak of his death, Jesus uses the term “Son of man” rather than “Messiah” or “Son of God”. The term characteristically belongs to Jesus' own thought of his triumph through the cross. It is also characteristic for John to refer to the glorification of Jesus, including both death and resurrection in that term.

vv. 24-26. Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there also will my servant be. The Father will honor whoever serves me.

It seems as if the parabolic use of the seed which must die to bear fruit is used in three stages. First, the natural truth is stated. Continuation of the species of the seed is only possible if the seed die, i.e, if it ceases to be 'seed'. 

This is next applied to the life of Israel as God's people. What is true of seed is true of him who has come to offer the continuation of the life of God's people - he must die (i.e. cease to be the one true human embodiment of the life of God's people) if he is to keep that divine life forever. 

 But the same truth applies to all his disciples. They must all pass to their own inheritance in the etemal life of God's people, by sharing in the death of their Lord, and subsequently in his resurrection. The disciple must follow his Lord, and that will eventually take him to the place where his Lord finally dwells. So to serve Jesus Christ is to receive the honor of the Father, which is to be made manifest in the glorification of the Son.

v. 27. “I am troubled* now. Yet what should I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour.

John has probably gone independently of the synoptists to Psalm 42 for his quotation from the Septuagint. The quotation shows with what real disquiet Jesus approached the path ahead of him, but it also discloses that for him, as for all the evangelists, what was to take place was something placing even this supreme agony well within the purposes of God for securing the life of his people. 

It may well depict the cost to Jesus in his distress: 'My soul is cast down within me ... all thy waves and thy billows have gone over me'. But it also speaks of present help: 'By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me'. And it looks to an assured future: 'Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.'

v. 28. Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it and will glorify it again.”

In spite of disquiet, the dominant attitude of Jesus is of humble obedience: 'Father, glorify thy name.' The voice from heaven says that God has already glorified it, and the reference is to the signs that have, in John's theological understanding, revealed God's glory. Cf. especially 2:11; 5:41. 44; 9:3 (though the word here is 'works' rather than glory of God); and 11:4. 

God's glory is deliberately associated with the first sign, in which the evangelist shows how the future of Israel is not in the way of the old rituals and lustrations, but in the new purification achieved in the giving of the blood of the Son of man, which is the manifestation of God's glory. 

It is in the same way associated with the last 'sign', the raising of Lazarus, where Jesus announces and proves himself to be the true life of the new Israel, bringing to God's people a life over which death has no power.

The heavenly voice also says that God will glorify his name again. The cross will be the actual purificatory action which the first sign prefigured. It will be the actual passage of the new Son or Israel of God from this world where his glory can only be seen in ambiguity, to the realm where it can be displayed in its full authority and reality. 

The cross will actualize in the central event of all history what the sign of Cana and the sign of Bethany have prefigured.

v. 29. The crowd there heard it and said it was thunder; but others said, “An angel has spoken to him.”

Natural man, even the natural man among the people of God, can make of the divine intimation only two things: it can be taken for a natural event pure and simple - some said it thundered; or it can be given a spiritual interpretation, and then it is deemed to be a word spoken to Jesus for his help.

v. 30. Jesus answered and said, “This voice did not come for my sake but for yours.

Jesus reveals the real purpose of the voice, viz. that the members of the old Israel might be led to recognize both the signs that Jesus had done for what they were, and the sign that he was about to enact for what it would be.

v. 31. Now is the time of judgment on this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.

The word 'now' hastens the great crisis of the world on the moment of the crucifixion. At this point the old creation is corning to its end, and the new creation begins to be. The passage from the one to the other is not a simple physical process, but moral and spiritual. Hence, the need to assert that the moment of crisis is one of judgment. 

Just as, earlier, Jesus had indicated that the authorities had passed judgment on themselves by their treatment of the man born blind and healed by Jesus, so now he asserts that the world will pass judgment on itself by its killing of him (cf. also 3:18; 'He who does not believe is condemned already'). Jesus sees the moment of his elevation on the cross as the moment when he ascends his throne, and so dethrones the usurper who now presumptuously claims command of the world.

v. 32. And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself.”

'Lifted up' is deliberately ambiguous, referring both to the elevation on the cross and the exaltation to glory.

v. 33. He said this indicating the kind of death he would die.

This is also and perhaps inevitably ambiguous. By what death may mean the mode of death, i.e. crucifixion, or the sort of death, i.e. one that leads, not to the silence of Sheol, but to the glory to be shared with the Father.