Glory!

A sermon by Eugene Peterson
September 24, 1999, Wichita, Kansas
Text: John 12: 12-32 (NRSV)

The next day the great crowd that had come to the festival heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, shouting,

“Hosanna!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord?
the King of Israel.”
Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it; it is written:
“Do not be afraid, daughter of Zion.
Look, your king is coming,
sitting on a donkey’s colt!”
His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written of him and had been done to him. So the crowd that had been with him when he called Lazarus out of the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to testify. It was also because they heard he had performed this sign that the crowd went to meet him. The Pharisees then said to one another, “You see, you can do nothing. Look, the world has gone after him!”

Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip went and told Andrew; then, Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very, truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.

“Now is my soul troubled. And what should I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die. [John 12: 12-32 (NRSV)]

When I was asked to preach in this act of worship, I went looking for a text. And I found a text at the center of St. John’s Gospel that I thought would be appropriate to what we’re doing today in this place, at this time: “Father, glorify thy name.” I wanted something celebratory, and I also wanted something that would hold a lot of things together. This text, right at the center of St. John’s Gospel, holds the entire Gospel together.

One of the things that attracts me to this text on an occasion like this is that it’s written by a man who has been through it all. John, the apostle-one of the first of those called to follow Jesus and who kept following him decade after decade-now toward the close of the century is wrapping it all up. He’s pulling everything together to carry on the tradition that he’s been given, this life that has been a gift to him and the early community. He’s about to die and leave this for the next generation.

Another thing that attracts me to this text is that it comes at an end of an era. It comes at the end of a century. We do that one better by being at the end of a millennium, but the conditions are quite a bit the same. Things are not going very well. The moral life of the world is crumbling. As we’ve grown in prosperity and power and technology, we’ve declined in virtue and values. Things aren’t looking too well.

But they weren’t at the end of the first century either. This great and glorious church had come into being announcing the entrance of God into our midst, raising expectations that things were going to be better. The Messiah was here and everything was going to be as Isaiah had prophesied. But at the end of the century the Lord had not come back. Things were worse. The crucifixion that the Romans had executed on Jesus now had been extended to Christians. People were being killed right and left. It was difficult and dangerous to be a Christian. This great, victorious life the church had entered into looked pretty shabby.

John shows something quite different. The way the writers of Scripture report reality, and the way journalists and historians do it are radically different. Who are we going to believe, the journalists, the reporters, the historians? Or are we going to believe the Gospel, its Holy Spirit inspired truth? That’s my choice and this is my text: “Father, glorify your name.”

Glory! It’s a wonderful word. It’s a glorious word. I first heard this word from my pastor. I was about ten years old when Pastor Paul Jones came to my congregation. Our little Montana valley, in which I’ve recently returned to live, was full of glory as Paul Jones gave expression to it. Paul Jones was a Pentecostal preacher and a Welshman. I don’t know which part was more important. He was a big man, and he had a Welshman’s voice, filtered through Pentecostalism. When he said the word “glory,” which he often did, it started low, a rumble, and it built into thunder like these 32-foot pipes on the organ. When I say “glory,” it has two syllables, but it was multi-syllabled with Paul Jones. I couldn’t hope to repeat it. He said it a lot, this “glory” which was like thunder. His lungs an organ, building in volume. It didn’t matter what he was preaching about, “glory” was interspersed at random, seemingly out of context, but it never seemed out of context when he said the word. Hell-fire sermons, hope-of-heaven sermons, advice sermons, comforting sermons, judgmental sermons?it didn’t matter what it was. “Glory, glory, glory.”

I learned what the word meant from listening to him, even though I never went to a dictionary. Later on, I learned how the word was used in Hebrew and Greek. I began to collect all the scholarly information on this wonderful word, “glory,” but I don’t think I ever learned anything new. I knew it all from the way Paul Jones had said that word.

I had a glimpse of something that was the reality of the Gospel of the Kingdom, but it was a word “out there,” every once in a while rumbling and announcing something. I needed rootage; I needed to know how this got into my life. I found it in the passage that precedes our text: “Jesus answered them, ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very, truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.’”

Well, that’s a surprise. If you’ve been reading the Gospel of John and come to that verse, it’s a shocker. The word first occurs in the first chapter, “The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory.” Those great, opening, poetic lines of St. John, moving up to that climactic phrase: “We have seen his glory.” After the first miracle, the turning of water into wine at Cana, “he manifested his glory.” And the word keeps erupting, just like Paul Jones’ “glories,” through the Gospel: in Chapter 5 after the healing of the man at the pool at Bethesda; the feast of dedication in chapter seven? glory, glory; the discourse after the feeding of the 5000?glory again; and working itself up by stages, getting louder, more powerful, collecting resonance. I begin to feel all that stuff from Moses and Isaiah and Ezekiel behind this and collecting into wonderful, thunderous harmonies. Then the raising of Lazarus and the word “glory” again: “You will see my glory.”

And then we get this: “The time has come to be glorified: Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” There have been hints, but now things are coming to a close. Jesus is going to die. “And what should I say,” he says. “‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.”

Now it’s unmistakable: Glory has something to do with death. All these glorious images of “glory” that we’ve been collecting suddenly are stopped, and we have to re-vision what’s going on, re-understand what “glory” means. I’ve been collecting these wonderful images all my life, what “glory” means, and now I’m stopped. We’re all stopped. Death.

This is not the first time Jesus has talked this way-giving up our lives, denying ourselves. He’s been preparing for this all along; not repudiating the other images we’ve had, but now recasting them in such a way that we must absolutely divorce ourselves from our projections, what we’ve been reading into this word all of our lives. We’re going to die. If we’re going to participate in this glory the way we’re being invited to do it by John, we’re going to have to do something about death.

The good news is that we don’t have to wait until we die to die. We don’t have to wait for our funerals before we know what’s going on. As Teresa of Avila, that audacious and most vivacious saint, once said, “The pay begins in this life.” So we’re starting to learn to die following Jesus, but that means we have to relearn the word.

Andrew and Philip went to Jesus and said that some Greeks wanted to see Jesus. Here is a most astonishing thing. (Try to get this one into your evangelism manuals.) A great window of opportunity, and what does Jesus do? He ignores them. He proceeds to this most surprising, astonishing moment to show us what “glory” means, how it takes root in our lives, in our communities, in our churches. This is the rootage of this glorious, thunderous “glory” that I grew up hearing. Now I’m finding out how it gets into me, into us, into our place.

A few chapters later at the end of this story, Jesus is praying that great prayer, interceding for us and for the world just before his death. In that prayer in Chapter 17, the word “glory” is used eight times as he prays, either as a noun or as a verb. Clearly “glory, glorify” are coming into their own now as Jesus first prays in Chapter 12, “Father, glorify your name,” and now he is praying for the glorification of us. We’re being included in it. But now this astonishing sentence: “The glory that you have given me I have given them.” (Chapter 17:22).

Didomi, this great verb in John’s Gospel-we heard it first in John 3:16: “God so gave his Son”? and now Jesus is using the same verb again, didomi, in his prayer: glory is given. Not “will be given”; not “wait around for it to be given.” I have given it. How perfect. It’s done. It’s accomplished. Given.

Look around you. Her? Glory in her? In him? You’ve got to be kidding! In me? Glory? Can’t be, but there it is, Didomi: “The glory you’ve given me, I’ve given them.”

Friends, this is what we’re dealing with. This is what we’re celebrating. This is the renewal that we’re a part of. This is the new life in Jesus, in Spirit, now working in our lives. Open your eyes. Open your ears. Listen to what Jesus said. Following through this Gospel of John, all these Scriptures collect now in something that’s focused: “Father, glorify your name.” In the most unlikely way, the most unlikely people, starting with death by crucifixion.

Brenda was a young girl in my congregation, 17 years old, beautiful, vivacious. A young man, David, came into her life and started courting her. A more inappropriate courtship you never imagined. Brenda was beautiful, gentle, Christian, Presbyterian. David was rough, crude, rude, an Irish cop. They wanted to get married. I did everything I could to discourage this. They were not suited to each other. I did my best to prevent that marriage from happening but was unsuccessful and finally married them-or maybe I should say I conducted the ceremony.

David had a military obligation to fulfill for two years, and they went off to Alaska and lived in an alcoholic haze. They came back; the marriage was in bad shape, and they came to me to fix it. I did my best, but without hope-they were totally unsuited to one another. After a couple more years of making one another miserable, they tried the geographical cure and moved to Alaska. Every six months David would call me asking for help; most often he was drunk when he called. They started going to church again, a little Pentecostal church, and had a spiritual experience. In the next phone call David announced that God was calling him to be a pastor. I thought, “Fine, let the Pentecostals take care of him.”

The next call after that, he was drunk again. After another couple of years, they had joined a Presbyterian church, and David said he wanted to be a pastor. I said, “David, you haven’t been to college; do you realize how long that is going to take?” I tried to discourage him, but he ignored me, as usual. He started going to night school and eventually got his degree. The biannual calls continued; they seemed to me exercises in futility even though the drinking had stopped. The next call informed me that he had been accepted in seminary. And then a final call-David had his theology degree, was called to be a pastor to a little country church in North Dakota: Would I come and preach his ordination sermon. All those years of my faithless listening, hopeless praying now issued in this.

There were 40 or so people in the congregation-country people. David and I sat in the chancel, and just before the sermon the choir sang, five women, all over 70, sang, “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder, I’ll Be There.” Their voices were thin and quavery. I felt embarrassed. And then David leaned over to me and said, “Don’t they sound like angels?” I turned toward him, all my old reservation about him alert again. Rude Irish cop! I thought he was mocking them. And then I realized he was dead serious: “Don’t they sound like angels?”

And at that moment, I knew David was a pastor. He heard the glory. He saw the glory. In those five voices, David was hearing angels sing. David heard and saw the glory of God in that place. And then I got it: glory, glory, glory. David heard it in the women; I saw it in David.

Glory in the most unlikely person in the most unlikely place through those most unlikely voices. And all because Jesus prayed, “Father, glorify your name.”

Are you watching? Are you listening? Are you letting this Gospel train your eyes and your ears to what the glory is? That it comes out of death, it comes out of disappointment, it comes out of everything you think is supposed to happen that doesn’t happen. There it is. It comes out of your faithlessness. Your dullness. Your giving up. But staying there long enough to get that last phone call, “Would you come and preach my ordination sermon?”

And listen to the angels. They’re singing, friends. They’re singing all over the place. And David’s preaching the glory! Amen.

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