Beyond Spiritual Supplements - John 12:20-33
My cabinets are filled with supplements, half past the expiration date and three-quarters full. There are unopened bottles of omega-3 fatty acids and sprays of vitamin D, bags of collagen and canisters of magnesium. They all mark my various attempts to find a healthier, fuller life.
And that’s what we all want, it seems. These days, you can’t even pump gas without an “influencer” interrupting the chirps of House Sparrows with a tip for a better you. Our watches remind us when to move, calculating our “metrics” in bright images broadcasts to our phones. And a trip to the grocery store isn’t complete without being interrupted with a reminder to have a “mindful minute.”
These contemporary expressions are only the latest manifestations of a long-running human effort to add some missing element to our lives, a supplement to make us “more.” Princeton University Press has been publishing a series of books, repackaging ancient wisdom for our self-improvement culture. There is Aristotle on How to Innovate, the Roman poet Horace on How to Be Content, and most recently, the early Christian monastic John Cassian on How to Focus (I bought that one as soon as I saw it advertised).
In such a world, it is easy to offer our faith as another packaged product—a spiritual supplement to make you better at doing you. Come to church, hear some nice prayers, participate in some ancient liturgies—all of this will give you some spiritual goods to make your life better, fuller, happier. It’s an attractive vision and I admit that in addition to powders, sprays, and pills, I’ve consumed a good many spiritual supplements in my day.
Our scriptures this Sunday, however, will let us have none of this.
Take the Gospel of John, where some gentile Greeks are on a spiritual quest in Jerusalem. Their search for truth has led them to the God of Israel, but in their request to see Jesus, we can catch a whiff of the desire for spiritual novelty; that idea that if we find just the right teacher, just the right holy place, we will be made whole. To paraphrase our contemporary psalmist Bono, “they still hadn’t found what they were looking for,” and so they surely wondered—could Jesus be it?
In typical Gospel of John fashion, Jesus responds to this simple question with a meandering discourse. If we pay attention, though, we will find in Jesus’s words a truth that goes beyond supplements—a call to discipleship that is not about adding anything, but is instead an abandoning all to become something new.
In this call, Jesus echoes a promise Jeremiah long ago proclaimed to a people who were deeply in need of hope and happiness. Jeremiah is often called the “weeping prophet” and many images of him through art history show his eyes flowing with tears. His message was to a nation that was on the brink of losing everything, and yet still trying to preserve itself through its own power rather than relying on God’s mercy. But after all of Jeremiah’s warnings came to their fruition, and all was lost, the prophet offers some words of comfort.
The vision he offers isn’t that their fortunes will be restored and all will go back to normal. Neither is it a call to buckle down and get their religious lives in order. Instead, Jeremiah, offers this opportunity of complete desolation as a time to welcome the radically new life God is working in the world. And as other prophets of his time proclaimed, this new life that would begin from within Israel would become a light for all people, eventually becoming a source of hope for Jews and Greeks alike.
Those Greeks wanting to see Jesus were part of the fulfillment of that promise. But to live into it, they would have to get away from the old patterns of religion, the idea that Jesus could be one more thing to add to their already full lives. Jesus tells his disciples, in effect, that if the Greeks or anyone else want to see him, they should look at the cross; if they want to follow him, they should pick up their own. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor martyred by the Nazis, put it: “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” To die to our self, to die to our ambitions, to die, even, to the lives we love and want to make better. It is a hard call to follow, and unlikely to get the endorsement of any self-actualization influencers. And yet, it is through the journey of the cross that we are invited into a the world of resurrection life God is making.
In his profound little book, Metanoia: The Shape of the Christian Life, Brother John of Taize writes that “even the most impressive Christian virtues run the risk of being integrated into a whole that does not awaken us to the breathtaking Newness of God, but merely adds an attractive icing to the cake of a life already well-structured in human terms.” When I read those words I felt the stab of their truth—Brother John names danger for me and for many of us us here at Christ Church. With all the caveats, our lives can seem put together, “well-structured in human terms.”
I imagine that many of us are like those Greeks in Jerusalem. We are searching for truth, longing for a deeper spiritual life, and we have the means and ability to pursue it, even taking an exotic pilgrimage here and there. None of those are bad things, but we have to watch that they do not shut us off from the total transformation that Jesus is calling us toward, a transformation that requires us to stand before the cross, giving over whatever we are clinging to of our lives so that they will die with him.
Are we ready for that freedom? Do we want the radically New Thing God is doing in the world? Are we willing to enter the death of the cross, so that we can join the New Creation of the resurrection? Are we willing to be made into new people, who have been transformed to our very center, our hearts? These are the questions our scriptures invite us to ask; they are questions we should ponder as we move into the journey of Holy Week.