tuesday of the fifth week in lent

Date: Tuesday, March 19
Contributor: Kathy Ackerman
Lectionary Link: https://www.lectionarypage.net/WeekdaysOfLent/TuesdayFifthWeek.html
 
The Gospel of John gives me a headache.  No, I don’t hate the Gospel of John.  It has a lot to teach us and is quite beautiful.   It has earned its name as being the “most theological of the gospels” because it is so heavily freighted with symbolic and theological language.  That theological density is what gives me a headache every time I read John.  John also gives me a headache because he tends to push me into thinking about hard realities.  This passage is no exception.
 
Martin Luther called this passage “a dreadful sermon, an appalling and dreadful word of farewell.”  I have to agree with him.  This passage is what is known in some circles as a “clobber passage” because it can be used to beat unbelievers over the head and shoulders. 
 
John has Jesus talking to a crowd outside the Temple, and he is outlining what is going to happen to him, but in a very mystical, metaphorical sense.  (John just LOVES making Jesus mystical and metaphorical.).  He also tells them that unless they believe in him, they will die for their sins.
 
Of course, the crowd isn’t going to get all that mysticism and metaphorical language.  They ask what you and I would ask.  “Is he talking about suicide?  “Who are you to be talking to us this way, telling us that we can’t follow?”
 
He then says “why am I speaking to you? I have much to say to you and much to condemn.”  He then talks about being sent by God, and that God has instructed him.  He concludes by saying that when he dies, those listening will realize what he was trying to tell them.
 
Clobber passage indeed.  But sometimes, we need to be clobbered, if only to remind us that Jesus wasn’t just a teacher, wasn’t just a healer, wasn’t just a good man who was killed by the Romans and then miraculously rose from the dead.  He is part of God, he IS God. 
 
The passage ends with “many believed him.”  After all that clobbering, all that darkness, somehow some of the crowd went away believing him.  That seems a bit odd, given the clobbering.  But again, sometimes, a good clobbering is what is needed to wake us up, to shake us up, to make us think a little more and a little harder.
 
I’m off to find some aspirin or Tylenol.