Isaiah 43: 16–21; Psalm
126; Philippians
3: 4b–14; John
12: 1–8
This is a homily by Fr. Gene
Tucker, given at St.
John’s Church in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania on Sunday, March 13, 2016.
“IS THIS 'THE BEGINNING OF THE END’, OR 'THE END OF THE BEGINNING’?”
(Homily texts: Psalm
126 & John 12: 1–8)
Our Gospel reading for this morning
describes a dinner party, given by Jesus’ dear friends, Mary, her sister Martha,
and their brother, Lazarus, in the village of Bethany. No doubt, the dinner
party began on a festive note (although John doesn’t specifically tell us that
it so….we can only surmise that that might be the case, for John does tell us
that Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead).
But then, the mood changes as Mary
anoints Jesus’ feet with a costly ointment. When Judas Iscariot raises an
objection, Jesus bluntly tells him and everyone else in the room that this act
was done to prepare Him for burial. It would be easy to imagine that the mood,
from that point forward, was gloomy.
What might have been going through
the minds of everyone who heard His remark?
One possibility is that they may
have asked themselves, “Is this the beginning of the end?”, the beginning of
the end of Jesus’ wonderful ministry, the beginning of the end of His marvelous
healings and His growing popularity, and the end of His inspired teachings.
Jesus’ death and burial would signal
the end of all these things.
Perhaps those in attendance thought
about the end of all these things, and perhaps they earnestly wanted these good
things to continue for a long time to come….Maybe they thought something along
these lines: “Lord, you are doing such
good and wonderful things…you’ve challenged the ruling elite of the people,
exposing their corrupt ways and their misuse of the Law of Moses. You’re
becoming so popular that some want to make you king. You are surely destined to
bring back the glory of our people, such as it was in the days of King David.”
We don’t know these things for
certain (although we do know that some wanted to seize Jesus and proclaim Him
as king (see John 6: 15), but it might be easy for us to identify with these
very human responses.
From a human point-of-view, Jesus’
prediction of His death and burial marks the “Beginning of the end.”
If we look at the events of Good
Friday, then this marvelous chapter in human history, the story of Jesus’ life,
teachings, miracles and care for the outcasts of His day, does come to an end.
If this perspective is the correct one, then Jesus becomes just one of the
greater lights of human history, a charismatic and persuasive figure who arises
at a very troubled time in history. If we see Jesus from a human perspective,
we are obliged to take lessons from His extraordinary teachings. If we see Him
as an exemplary human being, we should take inspiration from His model of love
and care for the downtrodden and the forgotten of the world.
But if we see Jesus from the
perspective that Easter offers us, then we must come to the conclusion that
Jesus’ death and burial is but the “End of the beginning”. In the events of
Easter Sunday morning, the risen Christ comes among His disciples, appearing
first to Mary Magdalene in the garden. There’s much meaning in Jesus’
resurrection: For one thing, His new life spells the beginning of the end of
sin and death’s reign. For another, His rising from the tomb signals that God
continues to care for all of creation, that God continues to care for every
person who is created in the image and likeness of God. God earnestly desires
to enter into an ongoing, personal and intense relationship with every human
being. God invites us into this intense and personal relationship by providing
– in Jesus’ rising – with the proof of His power over everything that would destroy
us: death and sin. Without the proof of
God’s power over life itself, there would be no reason, no basis, for us to
trust God and to accept God’s invitation to a new and rich life of relationship
with the Father through the Son.
Jesus’ nature, He who is fully human
and yet fully divine, challenges us to see Him in the full dimension of his
human-ness, even as we balance this perspective with a deep appreciation for
his one-ness with God the Father.
Neither perspective, the human one
or the divine one, can exist without the other. To neglect Jesus’ divine nature
in order to focus on His human nature leads us easily to regard Him from a purely human point-of-view. To regard
His divinity at the expense of His full human nature is to miss the importance
of God’s care for the everyday world you and I inhabit.
We are called to a balanced
understanding of Jesus’ nature, to a full acceptance that He came among us as
one of us, putting on our humanity to the full (even to the point of death on a
cross….see Philippians 2: 5–11). A balanced understanding of Jesus’ nature
also calls us to see that, in Him, the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.
No wonder that even death on a cross
could not separate Jesus, the only-begotten Son of God, the Christ (God’s
Anointed), from the Father, for the powers of sin and death tried mightily on
Good Friday to separate the Son from the Father and the Father from the Son.
They failed, and we are the victors, along with Christ.
So, for us, the Lord’s death and
resurrection marks the “End of the beginning”, for in Christ’s death and
resurrection, the seeds are sown for us to grow into a full and mature
love-relationship with God through the work of the Son. The fruits which flow
from the work of Christ on Good Friday, and His victory over sin and death on
Easter, will continue to bless us into all eternity. Indeed, Christ’s victory
is but the “End of the beginning” of the blessings that are ours through Him.
Thanks be to God!
AMEN.
