Sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year B
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 51:1-12
Hebrews 5:5-10
John 12:20-33
When I was four or five, my mother brought home a monkey.
We were living with my grandparents at the time, because my father had left us. My mom had just gotten her first job as a veterinary technician with a black veterinarian in a black suburb of Baltimore. He had a pet shop out front of his practice and that day had planned to euthanize Gus, a wooly monkey.
Wooly’s are relatively small monkeys with a soft wooly coat. They typically make good pets. Gus was even trained to use the toilet. But when Gus started climbing the drapes and peeking his little black face out of our big picture window, my grandmother demanded his removal. What would the neighbors think?!
In those days, conformity was king, and everyone just wanted to be “normal”, that is, pretty much like everyone else. Society had a structure, everyone had a place in it, and that was that. And nice white families in the suburbs did not have monkeys peeping out the front window.
My grandmother, usually a very quiet person, could not tolerate the possibility that her neighbors would see her in a way she didn’t want to be seen, that they would think of her differently than she wanted to be thought of. This was a threat in her mind.
We are barely aware of ourselves. And yet the self is constantly trying to arrange its life to its own liking. The self is many things. It is most of all our inner judgment seat, first emerging in the two-year-old, the little lord and lady who loudly insists what will and will not be acceptable, what will and will not happen.
Such outright attempts of the self at domination and control are usually met with resistance from adults in our lives, and so we sublimate it. We all know what happens if a child’s self-will is given its head: the so-called spoiled child.
But sublimation is not the end of the self. It goes into the dark, and works its will there, almost invisible to most of us. The self is what is working when we meet failure and find ways to blame others and justify ourselves, and it is working when we have a success and take all the credit.
All emotional suffering begins in the self’s inability to accept its life, in all the many ways that plays. Identity, status, privilege, power, wealth: the pursuit of these things and protecting them.
In today’s passage, there’s a Greek word, psyche, which is variously translated into English depending on context. The most common is “soul.” But the Greeks did not mean the immortal soul as a separate thing from the mortal body. They didn’t have any such concept. The soul was the self entire, the body, mind, heart and spirit.
“Those who love their life will lose it, and those who lose their life will gain it for eternal life.” That’s what we read this morning, but the word translated “life” is psyche.
“Those who love their self will lose it, and those who lose their self will gain it for eternal life.”
Our inner two-year-old never goes away. In many and various ways, the self struggles to create a life it will accept and to overcome or run away from what it will not. Our suffering emerges from the latter, and much of the suffering we cause.
But more important, we do not learn from what we suffer. The only lesson we learn is to fight or to flee from whatever we won’t accept. Challenges to our way of life, our identity, or our tribe usually drive us to self-justify, to defend, or to deny, no matter how valid or invalid the challenge. Normal people don’t own monkeys, therefore my identity as a normal person is threatened by the presence of the monkey. The monkey must go. We don’t see the monkey as an opportunity to enjoy the richness and wonder of life, one that we could even share with our neighbors. That possibility is destroyed.
We therefore construct a false self, a persona shaped to serve the needs of the self for status or privilege or power or wealth. Our true self, the fully human self, wants only to love, but that self is buried in the darkness of our inner being, hiding for fear of being found out and therefore rejected.
We lose our true selves when we unconsciously obey the inner two-year-old. And we live in a culture that plays to our egos constantly. Believe in yourself. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You have a God-given right to pursue your happiness.
We worship the so-called self-made person. We celebrate individualism to the point of narcissism. And yet, Jesus says, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains a single grain, but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” The unconscious rule of the self is like that single grain that produces nothing. If the self dies, it bears much fruit.
Later in today’s reading, Jesus uses the word psyche again: “Now my soul is troubled.” But if we translate psyche as self, it would read “Now my self is troubled.”
Those who love their self will lose it, but those who lose their self will find it for eternal life.
Now my self is troubled.
Jesus is applying his saying to himself. The great good news here is that Jesus struggled with self-will, just like the rest of us. But he used the challenges to his ego as a school, to reveal his own desire to rebel against the life God had given him, and to struggle against that desire. As Hebrews teaches us, “He learned obedience through suffering.”
Whenever we crash into a wall in our lives, be it illness, the death of a loved one, business failure, broken relationships, social or political conflict, whatever disturbs us and causes us to have negative feelings and to say and do negative things, it is an opportunity to learn about this tyrant that lives inside each one of us, the self and its iron will. It is a chance to shine a light on our own willfulness, our own struggle to shape the world in our image.
Jesus faced humiliation and death by torture. Of course, his self was loudly protesting. And it was here that he did a great miracle, a miracle he can do for every one of us. Listen to what he said:
“Now my self is troubled. And what should I say, ‘Father, save me from this hour?’ No, it was for this reason I came to this hour.” For this reason, to face my own self-will.
What a different way to approach failure and sin and death! One of my favorite desert fathers, the monks that went into the desert in the fourth century to pray and work, Abba Moses, famously said, “Love your enemies, for they teach you who you are.”
Jesus goes on to say that this hour, this hour when he faces and defeats his self will in order to glorify God, to reveal God’s love for the world and everyone in it, this is the hour when the ruler of this world is driven out. Who was the ruler of the world? Some say the devil, some say Caesar, but most Jews of his day would have said “Both.”
Self-will is the devil’s lever for pushing us away from God, but it is also the lever of society. My grandmother joined in a national effort to be “normal”, to deny her true self, a child of God enjoying every moment of the precious life God had given her, to serve the god of her tribe, this idea of normality.
The power of the devil is defeated not in great social movements, but in the darkness of the human heart, which seeks self in opposition to God. The devil and all his minions are defeated when we, like Jesus, become conscious of the many ways our self-will block our joy and freedom.
Jesus cultivated the power God had infused him with by facing the challenges of his time and place no matter how they threatened his self.
Imagine what it would be like to have no enemies, no axe to grind, no war to fight. Who would I be without my inner judgment seat? Who would I be without my inner two-year-old? What would be left of my identity, of what makes me me? What can my old resentments and hurts and failures teach me about my self and its power over me?
Jesus’ self-will was with him right to the end. He didn’t destroy it or get rid of it. He simply shined a light on it. Self-will loses its strength when we are paying attention to it. The point is not to destroy the self; the point is the struggle.
Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.
Amen.
