Not a secular messiah

Today’s readings: Jeremiah 31, 31-34; Hebrews 5, 7-9; John 12, 20-33.

Jesus is a lover of life and he speaks in terms of losing and hating one’s life precisely because that’s the only way of authentically finding life’s full meaning. Of course, this is not a self-evident truth. It is not a truth that can be argumentatively proved, but one that can only be existentially experienced. But once experienced, it becomes a message to be proclaimed.

At times we live as if we were immortal, as if life’s deep meaning can be grasped through what is ephemeral or superficial. Life’s meaning is too profound to be measured. Letting go to really grasp the meaning of what you are going through is a golden rule that Jesus makes us revisit this Sunday just before we enter the days that liturgically are really a sacred space.

Jesus speaks of losing one’s life at a moment when he is facing his own violent death. But unlike the usual setting of the gospel accounts, Jesus is here addressing not Jews or the elders or Pharisees or Scribes but Greeks who were strangers to God’s people and yet who approached Philip wanting to see Jesus.

Their ‘seeing’ Jesus was not mere coincidence or curiosity. Jesus considered their wanting to see him as something so extraordinary that he compared it to the hour of his glorification, which was meant to be the hour of his death. It sounds to all effects contradictory that Jesus sought to draw all men to himself in death not in life. Being a crowd-puller and a miracle worker, it should have been easier for him to draw people to himself while living.

Yet he never meant to just keep people happy. Jesus was always afraid of being glorified for the wrong reasons. That was Satan’s proposal at the start of Lent when Jesus was tempted in the desert, and it persists as the standard temptation for all the so-called secular messiahs. In principle, Jesus refuses these short-cut solutions.

Jesus was meant to be the crowning not of a covenant based on the law, but of a new type of covenant deep within the hearts of people. Jesus’ new covenant, already announced by Jeremiah, is tailor-made to a particular vision of human history and to a specific understanding of life meant to be in its finiteness a meeting point between the human and the divine, opening our humaneness to the mystery.

As the Letter to the Hebrews says in the second reading, it was through suffering that he was made perfect, becoming “for all who obey him the source of eternal salvation”. For those who believe, Jesus opens the way to the mystery that extends beyond our humanity to add value and meaning to all our suffering.

Today’s readings outline clearly what distinguishes Jesus from the numerous secular messiahs that marked history since the time of Jesus himself. What Jesus proposes is something that unfortunately has been distorted even by the Churches themselves.

In our times we continue to seek the right reasons for the marked decline of our religious systems in Western society. But little do we give attention to the fact that after all, Jesus could never be reduced to a mere social convention or to a mere branding of a particular philosophy of life.

As George Steiner writes in his book Nostalgia for the Absolute, “the political and philosophic history of the West during the past 150 years can be understood as a series of attempts to fill the central emptiness left by the erosion of theology”.

The major mythologies constructed in the West since the early 19th century are in themselves systems of belief in spite of the fact that at face value they look anti-religious because they postulate a world without God.

Looking around we cannot deny a deep-seated nostalgia for the absolute even in our times. It’s a pity that religion may be in decline not because it speaks about the absolute but precisely because it is failing to do so.