Read: John 12:20-33
In this week’s gospel text, Jesus has entered the final week of his earthly life, and things are beginning to feel momentous. Jesus wonders whether he should ask God to save him from what is coming, but decides otherwise: this is exactly why he has come to this moment. He names his vocation and his anxiety in a single breath.
Vocation comes from the Latin word vocare, to call. Down at its root, it’s a way of talking about what God is calling us to do. Vocation can encompass more than paid work, and many of us have more than one vocation. Your own vocation(s) might be friend, parent, computer programmer, square dancer, and/or preserver of your family’s recipes. Theologian Frederick Buechner describes vocation as “the place where our deep gladness and the world’s great hunger meet.”[1] The guideposts that help us discern where God is calling us are need and joy.
In this Sunday’s gospel text from John 12, Jesus shows us the tremendous power of finding the intersection of joy and need. Jesus has followed the joy that God has laid before him in the incarnation. He has walked, laughed, eaten, wept, embraced, healed, preached, taught, exorcized, and prayed. His earthly ministry has been one big beautiful mess of need and joy. It’s about to bring him to the cross, a place where Jesus does not yearn to go. But Jesus knows that this is the place where God calls him, because he has followed joy all the way there.
The cross itself does not fill Jesus with joy. Beyond and through it, though, Jesus perceives God’s intent to raise him, breaking the power of sin and death over creation. Creation’s need collides with the incarnate God’s joy in loving us, and Jesus chooses to stay on the path that leads to the cross and to our salvation.
This week’s devotions will invite you to seek the places where joy and meaning collide for you. Where, in Buechner’s words, are the places where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet?
[1] Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 95.