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John 12.20-36
Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.
“Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that 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 standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die. The crowd answered him, “We have heard from the law that the Messiah remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?” Jesus said to them, “The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going. While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light.” After Jesus had said this, he departed and hid from them.
I am a clinical psychologist. In the work I do professionally and that I strive to do personally, I rely upon a dialectic: as humans, we need to feel accepted; and we also need to change. Relatedly, we need to accept the present moment as is, and at the same time, make it better.
I have a client who has recently fallen in love. After many experiences of hurt and pain, in past relationships and broadly by way of living in a world that has made it hard for him to feel accepted, he met someone who inspires him and who makes him feel seen and valued. And he is happy. A couple of weeks ago, he and I spent our session trying to make sense of why he left this man’s house after having spent what he described as a beautiful weekend with him, and found himself sobbing in his car, unable to turn the engine on for overwhelming fear that the love he found won’t last.
And just before re-reading this verse for the second time, I had a session with another client that was centered on a series of panic attacks she has been having, triggered by anticipation of her first vaccination shot this weekend. This, after a year of unemployment and loneliness, triggered, really, by the hope of soon seeing her mother in person. Among the clients I have worked with, I have talked about and tried to remediate many such panic attacks. And also, intense episodes of anger that follow along such rigid lines of thinking, foci so singularly sharp, I don’t want to go near the edges. Or, feelings of sadness so heavy, they become like guttural cannon balls pinning my clients to their beds. Or I might confront smothering urges toward compulsions that when performed, provide so many of my clients a small moment of breathing room, before smothering them again.
A counterbalance to this tendency to become consumed, attached and hijacked by emotion, there is another tendency altogether that I often work on with my clients: the knee-jerk reflex of avoidance. I see so many of them respond to the discomfort of pain as if trying to use their whole bodies to block it out, push it away, try to make it unreal. Against the possibility of rejection, the memories of loss, feelings of insecurity, and even against the pain of compassion for others, I see people use whatever they’ve got to do this – mental strategizing, drugs and alcohol, physical hiding, blame. And at worst, the planning of life escape routes.
I initially found this verse so complicated. It seemed there were many details to the story, and it was hard to make meaning of them all. And I also felt a resistance; I had to push myself to read it again, working against a kind of forcefield blocking me from the words. Like my clients, I am attached. I am attached to so much in this life: my kids, my work, my marriage, my health, my sense of security, how I am regarded by others. I think I had a difficult time with this for the same reasons that my clients fear happiness itself, for the sake that it’s transient; I, too, panic at the thought of loss, numb myself in the face of stress, throwing up shields of excuses and denial and minimization at the first breath of pain. It seems to me that we are all so acutely aware in the recesses of our emotions, in the places we don’t want to go, that in fact, all is uncertain - has always been uncertain and will always be uncertain. We don’t want to feel the deep, almost white-hot pain that comes with acknowledging the truth - that what we have, what we love most and what we’ve worked for, what we think keeps us safe and gives us worth - we may have to surrender. What we cling to and clench our fists around, bank on and put our hearts in this life - are things that are always vulnerable to the risk of shifting, breaking, and in some cases, falling out altogether. And this hurts. It hurts in a way so visceral and frightening that we as humans do everything we can to avoid this truth. In ways sophisticated, nuanced, effective and entrenched, we avoid the pain of uncertainty. In the best of cases, we cry into our steering wheels, mourning the loss of control we otherwise like to think we have. Or we may go breathless, hearts pounding, limbs tingling. Or become mired in thoughts about how the world and others and ourselves “should” be. Or we may perform compulsions, ruminate, check, and seek reassurance where we can find it. We avoid until the lives outside of the walls we erect become unbearable to face, even as the walls start breaking. We cling and we hide. We cling and we hide.
And these efforts to control – where do they take us? Besides to the offices (or Zoom rooms) of well-meaning therapists, these efforts take us much deeper into places Jesus labels here as the darkness. Less so than bringing us somewhere, even more frightening, they take us away from where we need to be, away from what we value, away from where God might otherwise meet us. In an effort to wrap ourselves around pleasure, safety, competency, regard, anything that feels good – in an effort to restrain these things and aggressively keep them in place, we lose them. We lose our experience of them. And in an effort to shield ourselves from pain, discomfort, insecurity, fear, anything that feels bad - in an effort to hide our minds and hearts from being touched by them – we are overcome by them. We suffer. Those who love their lives will lose them and those who hate their lives in this world will live them eternally. What I finally hear in this verse is Jesus offering a different prescription: to accept it all and stay with him.
Jesus calls on us in this verse to do differently; he himself is modelling how to do differently. He is pushing us to acceptance: to opening up the knuckles we have clenched around what we value, and letting go; and at the same time, willing our hands to embrace pain and difficulty, and opening up. For it is with him, as his servants, where we may finally find the long-sought peace we all otherwise frenetically search for, as we attach to and avoid the shape-shifting illusions of what we think roots us in this world.
Having pushed through the forcefield and considered what I myself have to let go of and open up to, I find this verse especially moving right now, just before Good Friday, one year after the pandemic started and swept up with it the most glaring manifestations of human injustice and fault, certainly that I have witnessed in my own lifetime. There is so much we have all lost this year, so much that we all used to innocently rely upon. And there is so much we learned to face, so much we have to take in and accept. So much about the pained experience of our fellow humans, our fellow servants of Christ, and so much that has happened on heels of our own attachment to safety and pleasure and comfort, that we can no longer protect ourselves from. And though it hurts, it has to be. What we have lost, at best, has to make us finally more keen to see.
Jesus says that his soul is troubled. And yet he does not ask his Father to intervene. He does not ask for change. He does not try to control. He is troubled, and he accepts. This kind of acceptance takes great faith - faith in meaning, faith in purpose, faith in good, faith even in, perhaps especially in, pain. Jesus says, “it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.” And we have come to our own hour for good reason, too. Jesus faces his death with acceptance of the fallen world that he is leaving, and with intent to use his death to fundamentally change it. It is my hope that the faith required of acceptance, should we practice it, is exactly what glorifies God’s name and that what comes of it is the freedom to live fully and to follow Christ’s leadership in fully embracing our need as humans to change. And so, this Easter season, I use this verse to further my own commitment to living vulnerably, honestly and with openness, faith in God as the tethers upon which I will try harder to rely. And all so that I can finally be free to see how I can do better.