Sermon: 5th Sunday in Lent, 3/17/2024

Grace, Peace, and Mercy from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Some of my favorite sources of inspiration are movies. And when approaching this text from John’s Gospel, inspiration struck me once more from a Japanese film by the great Akira Kurosawa. I’ll be spoiling it for all of you a little bit, but it’s an old film that I wholeheartedly recommend. The film is titled Ikiru, a Japanese verb meaning “to live”. The story centers on the life of Mr. Kanji Watanabe, a Japanese Public Affairs official who has been paper pushing for over 30 years. 30 years of uninterrupted work, he never missed a day. He was given awards for his unwavering dedication. He is the chief of his office, but what we see in those first scenes is a man who is bored, stamping papers like a rusty machine, seemingly dead while alive. He is doing what is expected of him, he has the cushy position everybody wants, but he seems like a prisoner to the very work he has given so much time to. He looks sickly. All his co-workers are witnesses to his wasting away, giving him the nickname “The Mummy”, while waiting for the chance to take his place. But Mr. Watanabe is actually very sick. He is diagnosed with a terminal illness and given 6 months to live; he is terribly shocked by the news. The safety that his routine had given him is broken. He is suddenly confronted with the fact that he will die, and realizes that his life for the past 30 years had gone by meaninglessly. He looked up at his awards, and what did they mean in the face of his impending death? What did his life mean, not only to himself, but to others? It had seemed to him that by securing his life, he had lost it. Across the film, we see Mr. Watanabe, lost in the darkness of despair, with a haunting gaze at the camera. For the first time in his life, at the doorstep of death, did he ask himself: What does it mean “to live”? He begged answers from the young and lively, he sought answers in sensual pleasures, and yet the reality he was trying to avoid would ring like a bell and spoil the mood. That is until he realized that only he could answer the question, what does it mean to live? Only by taking hold of his own life and looking deeply inward could he discover what meaning his life should have. So he returns to that office buried in paper, and excavates the last request he had received before he’d disappeared after his diagnosis. It was a request by a group of poor mothers who were asking the removal of a mud puddle that was attracting vermin and making their children sick. As always, the system had buried this requests in an endless cycle of bureaucracy; their need was registered and forgotten in the oblivion of the office. But in facing Death, the reality of actually dying, Mr. Watanabe had received a gift in return: a purpose to live for. He encountered his life by losing it. The cross he carried revealed to him the answer. He determined to use those last 6 months of his life to atone for his own sin, that of abandoning his actual life in trying to secure it, the sin of detaching himself from the world around him by burying himself with busyness and accumulation of money and a position with a title. He used the scraps of his former life, those things that spiritually killed him, and sought to transform them into something good. Something that could give life to others. So he used the little influence that he had, the little time that he had, the newfound perspective that he had, and advocated for the poor mother’s cause, to create a children’s playground at the spot of the wasteland, to transform a place of sickness into one of joy. To achieve this, he broke the strict protocols the Japanese civil government had established, instead of persisting in pushing papers, he persisted with his meek, sickly, and low voice to convince the higher ups that this was a good thing. And everybody who worked for him was dumbfounded, what had taken hold of this man? They knew this man as this constant bore at a desk, and suddenly he moved with such direction and purpose. A man reborn, they thought, even as he looked so pale and weak. Five months later, Mr. Watanabe died. The park was built. When it was inaugurated, nobody of the higher-ups mentioned Mr. Watanabe. They took the credit in the papers, but the poor mothers whose desire was fulfilled by Mr. Watanabe’s zeal to bring this park into fruition, knew who really had transformed that place. At his funeral, everybody was piecing together the mystery of Mr. Watanabe’s newfound life. A moving scene where all the people impacted by Mr. Watanabe’s 5 months of life paid their respects to his memory. His co-workers then realized, that their own lives were convicted by Mr. Watanabe’s example. They were also not living. They also were wasting time. What was the end-goal of their life? At the end of the movie, we see that Mr. Watanabe died with peace in his face, in the very park that he constructed. He never saw the happy faces of the children, but he knew in his heart, that he had lived the life he had left. Someone once threatened him to deter him from building the park in order to build their own business: “Do you value your life?” And Mr. Watanabe simply smiled. There is a great paradox here, the fact that in dying we live, that death reveals the truth of our lives, while living on automatic pilot or living without the humility of mortality, makes life itself death. In the struggle of losing or saving our life, we are confronted with the ultimate question of meaning. And we all try to answer that question in whichever small or big ways we can. For Mr. Watanabe, to lose his life was to save it. He planted a seed of love he never saw the fruits of, and discovered that faith in goodness and goodwill was the substance of life itself, that life that eluded him for so many years. He perhaps discovered that inward law written on the heart that Jeremiah speaks of in our first reading.

Jesus challenges us in the same way in our text today. He asks us to follow Him, and to follow Him means to die to certain aspects of ourselves that we protect so dearly but are actually killing our souls. Following Jesus means to crack open the shells we have constructed and open ourselves up to God’s purpose for our lives on this earth. In today’s Gospel, Jesus is driven with purpose. It’s propelling Him towards that end that He knows is difficult, but that in the end, it will manifest the glory of God. His purpose reveals God and His goodness to the world. The question is presented to us: what is our purpose? What is our meaning in the face of the world’s difficulties? Presbyterians have this great line in their catechism: “Question: what is the purpose of humankind? Answer: To glorify God and enjoy Him forever”. There is another good line from the Early Church: “The glory of God is a human being fully alive”. God wants us to live! To live truly and fully is to glorify God, and we fulfill our purpose when we live, glorify God and enjoy Him. But according to Jesus, living and glorifying and enjoying God also means to die? What are we to make of this mystery? Jesus offers us a great image to explain this dynamic: “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.” He is talking about the resurrection, how it is His time to be glorified by fulfilling God’s Will and that entails going through the ordeal of the cross. You can’t have the resurrection without death on the cross. The cross is the painful reality, but resurrection is the fulfillment of God’s promise and love for us, to keep true that death and evil will not prevail in the end, but that goodness and mercy shall follow us into eternity. God does not want our life to remain a wasteland, he doesn’t want us to waste away at our desks like Mr. Watanabe, without appreciating the sunset or knowing the beauty of love. He wants to make our wasteland the playground. Our lives are not meant to remain a frown, but to reach the fulfillment of a smile in the face of death and hope in the resurrection. So the metaphor of the grain of wheat is such a powerful image. To live, we cannot remain in one stage of development. To live means to break open the seed, to grow out of the shell and let the shell die. By doing so, we are able to bloom and grow fruit for the world, thus glorifying God. For Jesus that was cross and resurrection. And for us His followers it will be no different. We will go through the painful realities, but equipped with the Holy Spirit, we transform those realities into opportunities where God shows up in grace and love. Mr. Watanabe, in a sense, exemplified this. The wasteland of this life was not the end, but the wasteland was the opportunity he had to make it a place of life. Jesus is the testament by which God signals to us that He wishes to renew all of us and make us agents of life. He wishes to draw all of us to Himself and make us participants of this great discovery: the discovery of purpose. And not just any purpose. We do not serve Jesus to line up our pockets, or to gain prestige, or to become more powerful. On the contrary, like in Mr. Watanabe’s story, we often gain our lives losing these things. We discover that the essential element to live, ikiru, is to glorify and enjoy God. And we glorify Him by participating in what He is, Love itself. And we enjoy Him, because we were made to love. That is the inward law that God has written in all our hearts, it is the reason there is forgiveness, because forgiveness is love that renews when we have fallen short. We were made to love, to live, and to praise. Let nothing and no one rob you of your God-given purpose. As we prepare to journey with Jesus through the upcoming days of Holy Week, we remember what drives Jesus and what should drive us as we live in His footsteps. The struggle will not be without love, life, and glory.

Let us pray: Lord God, you have wonderfully made us with beautiful purpose. Let us always remember what is most important, your abiding presence in our lives that reminds us to truly live, love and glorify you by following Jesus Christ. Let us never forget this wonderful knowledge! In the name of Jesus. Amen.