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John 12:20-33

 

Now among those who went up to worship at the feast were some Greeks. So these came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and asked him, "Sir, we wish to see Jesus." Philip went and told Andrew; Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. And Jesus answered them, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him.

 

"Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? 'Father, save me from this hour'? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name." Then a voice came from heaven: "I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again." The crowd that stood there and heard it said that it had thundered. Others said, "An angel has spoken to him." Jesus answered,  "This voice has come for your sake, not mine. Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself." He said this to show by what kind of death he was going to die. (ESV) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Death On a Friday Afternoon

Holy Cross

14 September 2011

The tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attack on the United States brought us face to face with death and its meaning. It reminded us of the debate about showing well defined images of people plunging from the Twin Towers to their deaths, trying to escape from the raging inferno of jet fuel that enveloped them. Have we thought differently about death and its meaning after the slaughter of 9/11? Have the events of that terrible day caused us to reconsider the value of life? Life is certainly cheap for those who will fly airliners into buildings full of people, incinerating themselves and smashing to smithereens those caught in the buildings when they collapsed. Did death on a Tuesday morning change the meaning of death for all of us?  

 

No matter how we might answer that question for ourselves, we must remember that death has a specific meaning for God. God cares about your life and your death more than you do. He cares for you more than you do. In our self-centered attitude we find it hard to believe that God cares for me, my life, and my death more than I do about them. No one could look out better for me better than number one; numero uno. How wrong we are, because we are not our own. We belong to our Master, who both created us and bought us back from slavery to sin and bondage to death by offering His beloved Son into suffering and death for us. How much more could He love us, to offer over into the hands of wicked men His precious Son as substitute for us? How could a greater contrast be conceived than that the holy dies for the wicked, the valuable for the valueless, and consecrated for the desecrated? Such contrasts only make clearer yet that the love in which God holds us comes entirely from Him. It is firmly set in His attitude, we have never and could never have been the meritorious cause of His love for us. Indeed, this makes clear what true love is, it can only be given and never earned.

 

"Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints" (Psalm 116:15). The value of our death is heightened by the Lord's intention to bring that death to us and through it to set us in Christ, the God who dies. When we die, we die to Him. This dying is the life of faith and thus is a continual discipline in the life to believers. Faith is the gift that keeps bringing us into death to the Lord. In Him we are dying to live. All this is shaped by a very public death that brings us face to face with the meaning of death. Have we thought differently about death and its meaning after the slaughter of the cross? Have the events of that terrible day caused us to reconsider the value of life? Did death on a Friday afternoon change the meaning of death for all of us? Death on a Friday afternoon changed everything.

 

John Chrysostom

 

"'For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's' (Rm 14:7-8). How can he who lives unto the law be living unto Christ? But this is not the only thing that he effects by this, he also holds back the person who was in so much haste for their being set right, and persuades him to be patient, by showing that it is impossible for God to despise them, but that in due time He will set them right.

 

"What is the force of 'none of us lives to himself?' It means we are not free, we have a Master who also would have us live, and wills not that we die, and to whom both of these are of more interest than to us. By what is said here he shows that He has a greater concern for us than we have ourselves, and considers more than we do, as well our life to be wealth, as our death to be a loss. For we do not die to ourselves alone, but to our Master also, if we do die. By death here he means death caused by the faith. If this were enough to convince us that He takes care for us, in that it is to Him we live, and to Him we die. Still he is not satisfied with saying this, but proceeds further. For after saying, 'whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's' and passing from that death to the physical one, that he may not give an appearance of harshness to his language, he gives another very great indication of His care for us." 

 

John Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans, 25 

 

Collect for Holy Cross

Merciful God, Your Son, Jesus Christ, was lifted high upon the cross that He might bear the sins of the world and draw all people to Himself.  Grant that we who glory in His death for our redemption may faithfully heed His call to bear the cross and follow Him, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

 

For David Held, that the Lord would be with him as he recovers from cancer surgery

 

For the Praesidium of the LCMS, which begins meeting tomorrow in St. Louis

 

For wives and husbands that they would grow in love and faith all their days

 

Art: D�RER, Albrecht  The Adoration of the Holy Trinity (1511)

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