PASSOVER is the festival setting for words of Jesus that are stuffed with premonition and (for the Christian, who knows where that is going) pathos. Lazarus has been raised. Jesus has proclaimed himself to be “the resurrection and the life” (11.25). He now explains what this may mean.
The first element within the unfolding scheme is the inclusion of the Gentiles, represented by “some Greeks” who come to see Jesus. The word used shows that they will not be Greek-speaking Jews, but Gentiles. Their presence and their desire are all that we find out about them, and this meagre material might lead us to think that they’re insignificant.
But it will not be so. For Jesus, they’re the sign that he has been waiting for. Their desire to “see” Jesus (which in John could mean physical vision or spiritual recognition) spurs him into the following stage of his mission. He responds by recognising that that is the moment when that begins.
The statement is dramatic, coming after three declarations that his hour “will not be yet come” (2.4, 7.30, 8.20). First-time readers may very well be forgiven for considering that it never was going to come back. But now could be the moment. He reveals that his glorification and death are sure together. “Death or glory” is a slogan amongst groups as diverse as military regiments and heavy-metal fans, but, for Jesus, it have to be “death and glory”.
Just before this, the raising of Lazarus was first a proof of power, then a foretaste of the resurrection, through which all humankind will share. This promised resurrection protects us neither from the anguish of dying nor from the decay of our mortal bodies afterwards. Jesus’s death shall be an actual death; his lying within the tomb shall be the actual interment of an actual corpse.
Here, Jesus uses a parable to precise the meaning of death in terms akin to Paul’s (1 Corinthians 15.36-38). The seed dies with the intention to live, and to generate more life. Death and life turn out to be features of the identical mandatory process in the approaching of a human individual to God. Fear besets so many individuals after they contemplate their very own death (in the event that they can bear to consider it in any respect). So, it’s indispensable — for John, just as much as the opposite three Evangelists — to point out that even Jesus, who has a relationship of perfect trust along with his heavenly Father, feels fear within the face of death, and needs that his end may very well be otherwise.
The Synoptics focus their version of this hard-won reassurance within the garden of Gethsemane. John locates it in the meanwhile of the approaching of the Gentiles, when a foretaste of the resurrection is revealed. Not even resurrection undoes human fear of the nice unknown. We must give Jesus’s words, “Now my soul is troubled,” their natural sense, nevertheless tempting it’s to skip to verse 27 with its forthright rejection of the choice to ask the Father for one more way.
“Glory” dominates this discourse about death. Through the crucifixion and resurrection, people will see anew the divine name, “I AM”, as regarding Father and Son. This has been the opaque message of the “I’m” sayings of Jesus, but here it’s clarified. If we wanted further confirmation that this passage — already so clear in its power and pathos — forms a climax inside the Gospel as a complete, now we have in it Jesus’s rejection of other paths: “No . . . Father, glorify your name!” At the moment of fulfilment, God speaks from heaven, and we hear his voice for the primary time.
It is simple to miss this if we mentally fill in what God “should” have said in John’s account of Jesus’s baptism. There can be the voice on the transfiguration, a story that John leaves untold. God’s glorifying is a two-stage process: there may be the glorifying that got here through the incarnation, which John refers to as prior to now (“now we have seen”, 1.14); and there may be the glorifying that’s yet to come back (“I’ll glorify it again”, 12.28).
Amid the approaching cataclysm of the crucifixion, only those blessed and cursed with knowledge of excellent and evil — in other words, Christians (Genesis 2.17) — hear the message properly. For the remaining, it’s only a noise, terrifying, but devoid of meaning. Uncovering its meaning will turn out to be the duty of John’s faithful readers in all of the years that follow.
