Addresses Ely Cathedral, 30th March 2021: Holy Tuesday Address 2 Looking on the Face of God (2): Looking Up

‘When I am lifted up from the earth I will draw all people to myself’. John 12.31-36 There is a bleak little episode in the 9th chapter of Luke, where is refused a welcome in a Samaritan village [Luke 9.51-56]. It begins like this: When the days drew near for him to be taken up, [Jesus] set his face to go to Jerusalem. As soon as we hear these words, we know that the village’s rejection of Jesus is a foreshadowing of the great rejection to come, when the citizens of the holy city will turn on the one they welcomed in as King and fling him outside the walls as rubbish. The introductory words Luke uses, translated here as ‘when the days drew near’, fold the village’s refusal of Jesus into that larger prophetic pattern, the narrative of Jesus’s breaking. Jesus is dismissive - almost inattentive - when his disciples express their indignation with the villagers. He waves their anger away. He is already looking beyond the smaller humiliation and towards the greater one. Jesus turns to Jerusalem with his face fixed. He is determined. We are being shown that he has subdued his personal longing – for his life, for his dignity, for his part in the human family - to the prophetic demand. His ‘set’ expression, even as it locks him into what will come, also shows him choosing the inevitable. He is in command of the trial imposed upon him; he owns the death that he must die. To what experience does he look, with his face ‘set like flint’? (As Luke knew, the prophecy of Isaiah had used the same image for the suffering servant enduring shame [Isa.50.5-7]). But Luke makes plain that this shaming is a hidden glory. For Jesus, royal slave to our cruel humanity, will be ‘taken up’, writes Luke, using a word which means ‘ascension’. It’s an extraordinary verb to use of someone affixed to a gibbet, raised nearer heaven only in order for their pain and humiliation to be made more visible. Luke has re-purposed that makeshift gibbet into a celestial throne. Outside the walls of its flawed, earthly counterpart, the crucified King will reign over the heavenly city [Heb.12.12-14]. Luke is not alone in using this shockingly bold, transfiguring image. It is central to John’s . We first see it heralded in one of our earliest sights of Jesus as Messiah, through the eyes of a man called Nicodemus. Nicodemus was someone drawn to Jesus; he was a follower of sorts, but was so afraid of public opinion that he would only meet him after dark. Jesus said to Nicodemus that his body, with all that body meant, would be displayed for all to see: ‘Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up’ [John 3.1-15]. I will be medicine for the eyes, says Jesus, a sight who in the seeing will heal those watching, as the poisoned Israelites were healed at the sight of the bronze serpent upon its pole. What should kill – the death of God – will restore to life. Even as Jesus offers his body for healing, he presents to Nicodemus a tacit challenge. He is not someone to be met with in the furtive dark. His calling is to be held up for all to see. Later on, in chapter 12, the passage we have just heard, there’s no more secrecy. It is broad day. Jesus speaks to the hostile crowd, and he is brutally clear, as public as he can be. He speaks the prophecy that dooms him to die in his own voice. He deliberately lifts our eyes upwards; he invokes an image which sees him dying, yet enthroned: ‘When I am lifted up from the earth I will draw all people to myself’. We have no hint about Jesus’s tone of voice here, no equivalent to the ‘set face’ of Luke’s telling, but the directness, the physicality of his declaration gives it the gallant quality of a grim joke, something along the lines of Mercutio’s ‘tomorrow I shall be a grave man’ after he has been fatally stabbed. Jesus, though, makes Mercutio’s audaciousness look positively timid. This is someone in such complete command of the horror he must face that he can stand before a crowd undecided as to whether they will betray him now, or later, and tell them that the greatest humiliation they can devise for him will be an eye-catching glory, a world-changer for all who see it. It is impossible not to see, as he speaks, the awkward, obscene deliberation of the soldiers’ work, swaying up his bound and helpless weight, straining to force gravity into doing their killing for them. But just in case anyone has missed the point, the Gospel writer underlines it: ‘He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die’. Jesus makes his proclamation with complete authority, but as he does it he also gives his power away. He uses – and must use - the passive voice: ‘when I am lifted up’. Kings and condemned prisoners have this in common: that others act upon their bodies, though to different ends. This is a King in fierce, obedient service. Just as Jesus refuses secrecy, so he also rejects human indifference. When you see me, he says, you won’t be able to look away. Your eye will be drawn to my suffering, and when you see my face you will be taken into my heart. He knew that people had turned away; he had seen the crowds lose interest, became daunted by the difficulty of his call, become bored, distracted, when they got used to the miracles. He knew that even a cruel death was something to which the human heart could grow numb. Earlier in his ministry, he had hinted at this moment to a crowd that would not listen. ‘What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?’ he had asked, as people abandoned him in great numbers [John 6.60-66]. Few answered him. Now, on the cusp of his arrest, he is no longer asking. He is making a proclamation. Whatever it is that will draw your eye, says Jesus, horror or curiosity, compasssion or lust, boredom or entertainment, will draw you to the life I offer. We do so much looking. We spend so much time with the artfully extraordinary, simulated onscreen. What sight could there be, for us sophisticated lookers, which would leave us for ever changed? Before what spectacle would you kneel? Can you lift your eyes to this sight of too much weight for you? What would happen if you did? We aren’t quite there yet. ‘The light is with you for a little longer’ says Jesus to the crowd. ‘While you have the light, believe in the light.’ But he knows he is not being seen. Soon it will be night, when no one can work. The darkness will overtake the people to whom he is trying to show himself. ‘And when he had said this, he departed, and hid from them’.