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Not only to the Jews but also to the Gentiles Our Lord revealed the purpose of His coming, namely, to lay down His life for His sheep. To the former, He revealed Himself as fulfilling prophecies of His coming. But the Gentiles had no such revelation as was contained in the Old Testament; hence for them He drew an analogy from nature which they could readily understand.
The time was less than a week before His Crucifixion. He had already shown Himself as the Resurrection by raising Lazarus from the dead; He had fulfilled for His own people an ancient prophecy concerning His humble but triumphant entrance into Jerusalem. Now it was time for the Gentiles to be given a lesson concerning the reason for His coming. The Gentiles were here represented by the Greeks, as later on they were represented by the Ethiopian eunuch who had embraced the religion of the Old Testament and was coming up to Jerusalem for the festivals. Because the Gentiles had not submitted to circumcision, they were forbidden access to the Sanctuary, but were permitted to circulate in the spacious Court of the Gentiles.
The Pharisees had already complained that the “whole world was running after Him.” As a proof of it, the Greeks, or the other sheep who were not of the fold, presented themselves to the Good Shepherd. While the enemies were plotting to kill Him, the Greeks wished to see Him. At His birth, the Wise Men of the East came to His cradle; now the Greeks, who were the Wise Men of the West, came to the Cross. Both the Magi of the East and the Magi of the West were to see a humiliation; in the first instance, God in the form of a Babe in Bethlehem, and in the latter, God in the form of a criminal on the Cross. As a sign leading to an understanding of His Divinity, the Magi were given the star; the Greeks, a grain of wheat. There is even some similarity in their questions. The Greeks said to Philip:
Sir, we desire to see Jesus.
JOHN 12:21
The Wise Men of the East had asked:
Where is He that has been born,
The King of the Jews?
MATTHEW 2:2
These Greeks had seen the triumphant entry into Jerusalem and must have been edified by the noble bearing of Our Lord. Perhaps what appealed most to them was the fact that Our Blessed Lord had cleansed the temple and said that His Father had made it “a house for all nations.” This revolutionary concept must have deeply stirred the spirit of universalism which was a characteristic of the Greeks. When Andrew and Philip brought their request to Our Lord that the Greeks wanted to see Him, He answered:
The Hour is now come for the Son of Man
To achieve His glory.
JOHN 12:23
At Cana, Our Lord had told His mother that His “Hour” had not yet come; during His public ministry no man could lay hand on Him because His “Hour had not yet come” but here He announced, within a few days of His death, that the time had come when He would be glorified. The glorification referred to the lowest depths of His humiliation on the Cross, but it also referred to His triumph. He did not say the Hour was near for Him to die, but for Him to be glorified. He grouped Calvary and His triumph together as He would do after His Resurrection when speaking to the disciples on the way to Emmaus:
Was it not to be expected that the Christ
Should undergo these suf erings,
And enter so into His glory?
LUKE 24:26
To His followers the Cross presently seemed as the depth of humiliation; to Him it was the height of glory. But His words to the Greeks also meant that the Gentiles were to be a feature of His glorification. The wall dividing Jew and Gentile was to be broken down. From the first, He saw the full fruits of the Cross growing in heathen lands.
The answer He gave to the Greeks was most appropriate. Their ideal was not self-renunciation but beauty, strength, and wisdom. They had a disdain for extremes. Apollo was the very opposite of Our Lord whom Isaias prophesied would have “no comeliness” in Him as He hung on the Cross.
To bring the lesson of Redemption home to the Greeks, He used an example from nature:
Believe Me when I tell you this; a grain of wheat must fall
Into the ground and die, or else it remains nothing
More than a grain of wheat; but if it dies,
Then it yields rich fruit.
JOHN 12:24, 25
He had often used many parables about seeds and sowing, and had called Himself a seed: “The Word is the seed.” In one parable He likened His Mission to a seed falling on different kinds of ground, explaining the response different souls made to His grace. Now He revealed that His life would have its greatest influence through His death. Nature, He said, was stamped with a Cross; death is the condition of a new life. The disciples would have kept Him as a seed in the granary of their narrow lives. But if He did not die in order to give new life, He would be a Head without a body, a Shepherd without a flock, a King without a kingdom.
One wonders if the Greeks, knowing that His life was in danger, had not suggested that He go to Athens to be immune from the cruel fate awaiting Him. Jerusalem, they may have warned, intended to kill Him; Athens had killed only one of their great teachers, Socrates, and it had regretted it ever since. In any case, He reminded them He was not merely a Teacher; that if He went among them it would not be to play the role of a Plato or a Solon. Thus, He might indeed save His life, but the purpose of His coming was to lay it down.
Human nature, He was telling the Greeks, does not achieve greatness through poetry and art, but by passing through a death. It is likely that He even spoke of the “grain of wheat” to infer that He was the Bread of Life. Nature is a Book of God, as is the Old Testament, though not supernatural, as is the latter. But the finger of God traced the same lesson in both. The seed decomposes to become the plant. Making application of nature’s law, He told the Greeks that if He lived on, His life would have been impotent. He came not to be a moralist, but a Savior. He came not to add to the precepts of Socrates but to give new life; but how could the seed give new life without its Calvary? As St. Augustine said: “He Himself was the grain to be mortified and to be multiplied; to be mortified by the unbelief of the Jews; to be multiplied by the belief of all nations.”
The second lesson immediately followed: they should apply the example of His death to themselves.
He who loves his life will lose it;
He who is an enemy to his own life
In this world will keep it,
So as to live eternally.
JOHN 12:26
No real good is ever done without some cost and pain to the doer. Like the legal impurities mentioned in the Old Testament, the purging and cleansing is done along with blood. Self-expression or the blind following of instincts received its death blow in this counsel to the Greeks. The Cross put into practice is self-discipline and the mortification of pride, lust, and avarice; only in this fashion, He said, will hard hearts be broken and harsh characters made peaceful.
The Greeks had come to Our Lord saying, “We wish to see Jesus,” probably because of the majesty and beauty of appearance which they revered so highly as followers of Apollo. But He pointed to His torn and battered self on a hill, and then added that only through the Cross in their lives will there ever be beauty of soul in the newness of life.
He then paused for a moment as His soul was seized by a frightening apprehension of the Passion and being “made sin,” of being betrayed, crucified, and abandoned. Out from the depths of His Sacred Heart welled these words:
And now my soul is distressed.
What am I to say? I will say,
Father, save Me from undergoing this hour of trial;
And yet I have only reached this hour
Of trial that I might undergo it.
JOHN 12:27
These are almost the same words that He used later on in the Garden of Gethsemane —words that are inexplicable except for the fact that He was bearing the burden of the world’s sins. It was only natural for Our Blessed Lord to undergo a struggle inasmuch as He was a perfect man. But it was not the physical sufferings alone which troubled Him; He, like Stoics, philosophers, men and women of all ages, could have been calm in the face of great physical trials. But His distress was directed less to the pain, and more to the consciousness of the sins of the world which demanded these sufferings. The more He loved those for whom He was the ransom, the more His anguish would increase, as it is the faults of friends rather than enemies which most disturb hearts!
He certainly was not asking to be saved from the Cross, since He reprimanded His Apostles for trying to dissuade Him. Two opposites were united in Him, separated only in utterance: the desire for release, and submission to the Father’s will. By laying bare His own soul, He told the Greeks self-sacrifice was not easy. They were not to be fanatics about wanting to die, for nature does not want to crucify itself; but on the other hand, they were not to turn their eyes from the Cross in cowardly dread. In His own case, now as always, the most sorrowful moods pass into the most blissful; there is never the Cross without the Resurrection; the “Hour” in which evil has mastery passes quickly into the “Day” where God is Victor.
His words were a kind of soliloquy. To whom could He turn in this Hour? Not to men, for it is they who need salvation! “Only My Father Who sent Me on this mission of ransom can sustain and deliver Me! I will not ask Him to release Me. This was the Hour for which time was made; to which Abel, Abraham, and Moses pointed. I have only reached this Hour of trial that I might undergo it.”
At the very moment when He spoke of coming to this Hour to undergo it for the redemption of men:
A voice came from heaven,
I have made it known,
And will yet make it known.
JOHN 12:28
The voice of the Father had come to Him on two other occasions when His Mission to the Cross was foremost: at His baptism, when He appeared as the Lamb of God to be sacrificed for sin; at His Transfiguration, when He spoke of his death to Moses and Elias while bathed in radiant glory. Now the Voice came, not in a river scene, not on a mountaintop, but above the temple, in the full hearing also of the representatives of the Gentiles. “I have made it known,” could have referred to the Father’s glorification up to the moment of His death; “and I will yet make it known,” could have referred to its fruits after the Resurrection and Ascension. Possibly too, since He was talking to the Gentiles in the precinct of the temple of the Jews, the first part could have referred to the revelation made to the Jews; the second, to the Gentiles after Pentecost.
In each of the three manifestations of the Father, Our Lord was in prayer to His Father, and His sufferings were predominantly before Him. On this occasion, it was the effects of His ransoming death that were proclaimed.
It was for your sake, not for Mine,
That this utterance was made.
Sentence is now being passed on the world;
Now is the time when the
Prince of this world is to be cast out.
JOHN 12:30, 31
The Father spoke to convince His hearers of the purpose of His Mission—not just to give the world another code, but to give a new life through death. He spoke as if His Redemption were already accomplished. The sentence or judgment passed on the world was His Cross. All men, He said, are to be judged by it. They will either be on it, as He bade the Greeks to mount it, or under it, as were those who crucified Him. The Cross would reveal the moral state of the world. On the one hand, it would show the depth of evil by the Crucifixion of the Son of God; on the other hand, it would make evident the mercy of God by offering pardon to all who “take up their cross daily” and follow Him. Not He, but the world, was being judged. Not He, but Satan, was being cast out. The Cross alone mattered; teachings, miracles, fulfillment of prophecies—all these were subordinate to His Mission to earth, to be like a grain of wheat which would pass through the winter of a Calvary and then become the Bread of Life. St. Paul later on picked up the theme of the seed that died to live and described it to the Corinthians.
Christ died for us all
So that being alive should no longer
Mean living with our own life,
But with His life who died for us and has risen again;
And therefore, henceforward, we do not
Think of anybody in a merely human fashion;
Even if we used to think of Christ in a human fashion,
We do so no longer.
II CORINTHIANS 5:15–15
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