"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." [John 12:23-26]
I remember this old bit by the piano-and-comedy virtuoso Victor Borge where the pianist is sitting down at the keys playing something, something whose rhythms seem vaguely familiar, but whose melody doesn't sound like anything well-known. He plays for a few measures, and then stops, turns the sheet of music upside-down, and begins again. And now, all of a sudden, it makes sense--it is the familiar melody of the William Tell Overture (known to many as the Lone Ranger theme). Borge's musical joke works by showing us you can have the music right in front of you but reading them upside down. And when that happens, you're missing what the music is meant to be.
Again and again, Jesus' role in the Gospels is like that--he is the one who takes the world around us and turns it on its head for us, only to enable us to recognize that he is helping us to see things right side up after all. We have had the correct data in front of our eyes, but without Jesus turning the page in the right orientation we will be reading creation itself the wrong way.
Here's an example of what I mean: you can look at the world around you and see the patterns of self-preservation in nature, and then conclude, "That must be how the world is set up--it's kill or be kill, dog-eat-dog." You can see the way the strong prey on the weak, the way that only the best and the brightest, the fastest and the most powerful, pass along their genes, while the lesser creatures get eaten or starve. You can see all of those realities in nature and conclude that is how to 'read' or interpret nature--as one unending slog of killing and eating and overpowering one another. You can end up concluding that this is the way to determine "winners" in life, too--the one who defeats the other must be the best! The winners must be nature's--and therefore God's--choice to be on top. And the losers... well, they are just food for the winners.
You can take the data of the world around you and read it that way. And of course a great deal of human history has done just that: decided that might makes right, that the powerful must be better than the powerless, and that it is "God's" or "nature's" will for the strong to survive by dominating the weak. And of course, once you take that to be the truth, you are willing to do just about anything to preserve yourself, regardless of what you have to do to the other guy, just to keep breathing. It becomes really easy to justify anything if you already believe that the Law of the Universe is "kill or be killed, eat or be eaten." And using that pretext, we humans have done some truly awful things to each other... and we keep doing them.
But Jesus keeps turning the music upside down--or rather, putting it right side up, even when we get upset at him because he is upending the way we had gotten used to seeing things. Jesus makes a point about his own death on the cross here in John's Gospel, but notice how Jesus ties it into his own "reading" of the natural world. "A grain of wheat remains just a single grain as long as it stays out of the earth... but if it gives itself up, allows itself to be broken up, and essentially dies, then something amazing happens. Life!" Jesus teaches us to see that the created world is designed with self-giving love at its heart, too, much like that famous line attributed to Martin Luther that "God has written the Gospel not in books alone but in every tree and flower," and that the promise of resurrection is to be found in creation itself "in every leaf in springtime." Now, while certainly the reawakening of the crocuses in my yard each March is in some way different from Jesus rising from the tomb, the point is that creation itself is dropping hints about how God really does things. And instead of just seeing violence and self-preservation in the created world and assuming that's "how it's supposed to be," Jesus turns the sheet music on us and points us to see that surrender and self-giving are in fact hard-wired into the created world first. A grain of wheat will just sit there and do nothing, unless you let it die--then it has real creative power. The seed that is kept in the envelope you bought it in from the home and garden store will never do anything as long as you try and "preserve" it. It must be broken open for life to happen. It must die so that new life can begin.
Jesus wants us to see his own death and resurrection in this way, too--that it is in keeping with the way God really has organized the universe. We just have been reading the notes in front of our eyes upside down. Every time we justify our own selfishness with the rationalization, "I had to do it to them first or else they would have done it to me!", every time we act out of the mindset of "I have to preserve me and my group, me and my kind, me and my DNA first--nobody else is as important!", and every time we decide it is better to look out for ourselves than the needs of the stranger because they are "just" a stranger, we are misreading the created order itself. We are misreading nature. We are misinterpreting the world before our eyes, and doing it in such a way as to let ourselves off the hook to excuse our self-absorbed inclinations.
But Jesus intends for us to see rightly... so that we can love rightly... and so that we can be loved rightly, too. Jesus interprets his own death on a Roman cross, not as the rightful triumph of the strong Roman Empire over a weak rabbi, but as his victory over death the same way a grain of wheat triumphs over death and unleashes life at the instant it surrenders itself to being broken open. Jesus turns the music right side up so that we can see his own death and resurrection come from the same divine logic that makes seeds surrender their own lives to create a new harvest, or that allows a mother killdeer to offer her body up to a predator with a broken-wing dance to preserve the life of her young. Jesus wants us to see the power of self-giving love is in fact reflected throughout creation--if we have been missing that, then perhaps it is because we have had the music upside down in front of our eyes.
Today, let us see rightly. That is, what if we started this day asking the living Jesus to turn our old preconceptions upside down from where they are now, so that we can see his self-giving love underlying all of creation? What if we gave up our old "Hey, it's a dog-eat-dog world" excuses and considered how God's power and love are shown? What if we dared to trust Jesus to show us what true victory really looks like?
Lord Jesus, turn our vision the right way. Reorient us, so that we will be able to see your love woven through all of the universe.
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