Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent
“For he himself knew what was in man”
Jesus “himself knew what was in man,” John tells us. It is a perplexing and yet an illuminating comment. It comes in John’s Gospel just after the wedding feast at Cana of Galilee, just after the casting out of the money changers in the temple at Jerusalem, just after the prediction of his death and resurrection imaged in terms of the destruction of the temple and its being raised up in three days, just after “many believed in his name when they saw the signs which he did” when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover feast. About those “many [who] believed in his name,” John tells us, “Jesus did not trust himself to them, because he knew all men and needed no one to bear witness of man; for he himself knew what was in man” (John 2. 24,25). Wow.
“He himself knew what was in man.” And what is in us? As the context reveals, what is in us is the spectacle of deceit and distrust. “O put not your trust in princes nor in any child of man; for there is no help in them” (Ps. 146.2), the psalmist observes and reminds us, too, that “vain is the help of man” (Ps.60.11). So what is in us? Not much. Even more, there is nothing. And even more than nothing, there is the will to nothingness in us that is a disillusioning and destructive spirit. There is nothing in and of ourselves but the will to nothingness. It is really nihilism.
This is to speak in a kind of contemporary language, the language of a kind of existentialism, the language of the despair of reason and knowledge, the language of the triumph of the will to power over the will to truth, the language of atheism. But, such a way of speaking has its biblical basis, it seems to me, in the rather dark and bleak readings for The Third Sunday in Lent upon which Jesus’ word from John provides such an important commentary. Jesus “himself knew what was in man;” it is not a pretty picture.
The remarkable epistle reading from Ephesians and remarkably even more disturbing gospel story from St. Luke speak directly to the climate of disillusionment and despair in our contemporary culture, and yet offer the real and true remedy to our fears and worries; in short, they provide the counter to the culture of nihilism. “For ye were sometimes darkness,” as Paul puts it.
