Where, O Where?

Maybe it’s the weather.  Or maybe Lent.  Sometimes I weary of being “prophetic”, of trying to speak and live an ethic of Christian Discipleship.  My contributions to conversation are usually greeted with blank stares and crinkled brow; is there room for integrity and sharing and humility anywhere?  In my morning devotions I read from the First Letter of John, “…the [spirit] who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.”  I hope so…yet I wonder.

Readings for this Fifth Sunday in Lent deal with the quest for God’s presence.  We begin with Jeremiah 31:31-34 — the announcement of a New Covenant written on the hearts of those of the faith community.  “I will be their God, and they shall be my people…I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”  Had the houses of Israel and Judah given up on this promise, in those six centuries until Jesus?  Through occupations by foreign armies and cultural multi-national infiltration, did they also pray, “Where, O Where?”

Later Hebrews hedged about the divine origin of Jesus, “who learned obedience through what he suffered; and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.” (Hebrews 5:8-9)   ‘Way too adoptionist for me: I believe Jesus was the Christ at birth, not as a result of suffering/purification.  Yet the phrase “the source of eternal salvation” speaks to our craving for the tangency of both Temporal and Holy to be experienced daily.

John 12:20-33 is one of those passages needing study from any number of acrobatic positions.  For me, it’s better to take it one or two verses at a time, perhaps ignoring any sense of continuity.  Our purposes here would focus on the Gentile seekers (asking “Where, O Where?”) who came to Philip saying, “We wish to see Jesus.”  I suppose they wanted a one-on-one interview…yet there’s a longing there expressed by men and women of all ages who–at one point or another– realize that there must be Something More.

Paul McCartney’s song advises the world to “Live and Let Die”, a tragic surrender to the Devil of the Noon-Day Sun whose mantra is “Whatever”.  I won’t criticize, for I cannot.  Another song says, “The sun’ll come out tomorrow; betcher’ bottom dollar that tomorrow there’ll be sun.”  Where?  O Where?

God Help Us, Every One            Horace Brown King