A Holy Week Reflection for March 26, 2013

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. (John 12:20-24)


When I read this story, I always want Jesus to say, “Great! The Greeks are here! Now I’ll tell them the Good News and everyone will know that I came for the whole world! Now find me some Ethiopians and some Brazilians!”

But he doesn’t. He just turns to his disciples and speaks of his impending death. He ignores the Greeks altogether.

Who knows? Maybe the Greeks thought Jesus was a local magician and wanted him to pull some rabbits out of a hat. Or, they might have been sincere God-fearers and wanted to talk with Jesus about life and faith. That would have made great copy for John. Either way, it doesn’t happen.

Jesus made it clear that he came for “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 15:24). But he also claimed that God’s ultimate intentions were for the whole world (as in John 3:16). The two were not mutually exclusive, but his focus was, for the most part exclusively on the people of Israel. At the same time, the world would be impacted.

That’s an interesting paradox: Being exclusive for the sake of all. We often think of exclusivism as something negative, a party that sends out limited invitations. But Jesus knew that his mission involved the death and resurrection of the people of God, and he would enact that in his own life, suffering, and death. He would represent the nation of Israel in his death and rebirth, and ultimately it would be seen that this representation included the whole world.

This helps we who follow Jesus today to understand that there is an exclusivism to being the people of God, in that we are first of all a worshipping community. Others might worship other gods, but we do not. At the same time, our exclusive worship and devotion is not for our own sake, but for the sake of the world. We order our lives around the work of the Spirit of God and seek personal transformation—and that’s good. But such transformation is not like self-improvement—it isn’t just for us. It is so that our lives would bear witness to Jesus Christ and provide evidence that the kingdom of God is, indeed, at hand.

And that is truly the party that sends out unlimited invitations.

The Gods of Washington

I just returned from a five day visit to Washington, DC. It was my first time there, and I loved the city. My wife and I did the typical tours, and I was glad to do that, since my feet started hurting after the second day and the double-decker tour bus became a beloved oasis for us.

After wandering through the grounds of the Capitol building, the memorials, the museums, and other great sites, I wondered how a visitor from a distant planet might interpret the architecture, statues, and engraved quotes that can be found in DC. If our visitor had studied all the religions of planet earth prior to her visit, how would she describe the religious leanings of the US if the nation's capital was her first stop?

I think she would say that, indeed, this nation of America shows itself to be very religious. Many of the engraved quotations reference God. And the architecture and statuaries would suggest an honoring of God—or gods, to be precise. Our visitor might conclude, based on her observations, that America is grounded in the gods of the Greeks and Romans. Those are the most dominant religious symbols in our nation's capital.

The only suggestions of any Abrahamic religions that I saw were in the Holocaust museum.

Maybe if people want refer to the US as a "Christian nation," or at least one that was "Christian" at its inception, they should wander around the National Mall and process what they see. Maybe it would be more accurate to describe the founders of the nation as Enlightenment Progressives, informed and influenced by British Anglicanism. Or something like that.

Don't get me wrong: I don't mean to disparage the nation's beginnings. The people who got this whole enterprise going were amazing people (with regular human faults, to be sure), who shared a grand vision for a new kind of nation, and they risked everything they had to take the plunge into independence. But they were also people of their time, and the Enlightenment formed their thinking in a very significant way. The symbols that were, for the most part, constructed in the 19th century, offer testimony to that way of thinking.

We ought to be careful about tossing around the term "Christian" to characterize the nation (or anything else, for that matter). Christianity's influence and presence has certainly flourished here (not always in good ways), but "Christian" probably isn't a category to which the country might somehow return. A return to our beginnings would probably surprise most of us.