SERMON FOR THE LAST SUNDAY IN LENT, MARCH 21, 2021     TEXT: JOHN 12:20-33 
One of these things is not like the others
One of these things just doesn't belong
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?
How many of you remember that familiar ditty from Sesame Street? In a 30-second spot, while the song was playing, four items would be displayed. For example, four balloons, three red and one blue. Or four hats, three belonging to firefighters and the fourth an elegant top hat just waiting for Fred Astaire to claim it. When the song was over, the outlier would be identified. 
     There was a second version of the song designed for quartets of items where the sorting was a little more complicated.
Three of these things belong together 
Three of these things are kind of the same 
Can you guess which one of these doesn't belong here? 
Now it's time to play our game (time to play our game). 
Then you are presented with a saw, a hammer, a pair of pliers and a sneaker. The first three items aren’t identical, but they are all tools, and the sneaker is not. 
     So, say I show you three Wonder Woman comic books and a copy of the Gospel of John — pretty obvious which one is not like the others. Then I line up the four Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — and tell you three of these things are kind of the same, and one of them . . . . Well, it’s not that it doesn’t belong here, but the fourth one, the fourth Gospel, is not like the others. 
     The reading you just heard is a good example. According to John, Jesus says, “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.”
     But in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus does ask the Father to spare him. He pleads for his life more than once as he prays in the garden before his arrest. Here is Mark’s account (14:32-39): They went to a place called Gethsemane; and he said to his disciples, “Sit here while I pray.” He took with him Peter and James and John, and began to be distressed and agitated. And he said to them, “I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and keep awake.” And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. He said, “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.” He came and found them sleeping; and he said to Peter, “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not keep awake one hour? Keep awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” And again he went away and prayed, saying the same words. 
     Jesus encounters silence in the garden. He returns to the sleeping disciples and goes forth to accept his fate:  And once more he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were very heavy; and they did not know what to say to him. He came a third time and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? Enough! The hour has come; the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand” (Mark 14:40-42). 
     In the account we just heard from John, however, Jesus gets an encouraging response to his prayer that the Father glorify his name: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” This is not like the voice from heaven that proclaims, “You are my Son the Beloved, with you I am well pleased” in the story of Jesus’ baptism as told by Matthew, Mark and Luke. The Jesus we meet in John does not need that kind of confirmation of his identity. He is perfectly aware of who he is. He is serenely confident in his relationship with the Father. As he tells those present, “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine.” God is revealing to the crowd that He has glorified his name in Jesus and will continue to do so. God makes this known at the end of Jesus’ public ministry, just before he is put to death. Jesus already anticipates the crucifixion as a victory: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” The Lord will reign from the cross; the name of God will be glorified in the crucifixion.      
     The church worked long and hard to understand who this Jesus was and how he saved us. According to the Nicene Creed, which dates back to the early 4th century, “we believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father; through him all things were made.” Eight different descriptors piled on top of one another to make clear that Jesus is truly God, not a creature, not a derivative being, but fully and eternally divine. He has to be God, because only God can save what God has made. 
     The Creed goes on to affirm that “[f]or us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary and became truly human.”  Truly human — not just a body animated by a divine spirit, but a complete human being  — blood, flesh and bone, but also a will and intellect, emotions and imagination. If he were a human body animated by a divine spirit, then the best of what we are would fall by the wayside. God would embrace only the shell of what he had created, when it is the whole of us that God loves. 
     The church insists that Christ is one person in two natures, fully human and fully divine. Jesus is not a hybrid like Hercules, who was half human and half divine, the son of Zeus and a mortal woman. From the time of the incarnation the Lord’s two natures are unmingled yet inseparable. You can’t identify the divine Christ apart from the human Jesus; you can only point to the one person, Jesus Christ.
     The doctrine of the two natures helps us understand the workings of salvation, but it also raises questions. What did Jesus know, and when did he know it? Did he go to the cross confident that the resurrection was just around the corner? Did he endure betrayal and execution, certain from the outset that the darkness would not overcome the light? Or did he go forward like you and I do, not knowing where we go, but trusting that God’s love will support us, even when the cup we must drink brings suffering and death? 
     In the Gospel of John Jesus stage manages his life’s end. While hanging on the cross he makes provision for his mother, entrusting her to the disciple whom he loved. He consciously insures that the scripture is fulfilled by saying, “I am thirsty. And after he receives the wine (a reference to psalm 69), he announces, “It is finished,” bows his head and gives up his spirit. Finished here does not simply mean “it’s over.”  Rather, Jesus is proclaiming that the mission his Father entrusted to him has been accomplished, brought to fulfillment, made complete. He dies at peace, in contrast to Mark’s account, where at the end our Lord endures our worst fear, that there is no Father caring for us, that we are alone. “When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’”(Mark 15:-34).  
     “Seek yourself only in Christ and not in yourself,” Luther wrote, “and you will find yourself in him eternally.”  Sometimes it is John’s bold Lord of the cross; sometimes it is Mark’s broken Jesus of the crucifixion. The radiant face of God, the vulnerable heart of humankind, are always before us in the one person Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, our brother and friend. Amen.