If you have your Bibles today and you want to follow along, we are going to be looking at John 12:20-25. Depending on where you get your news, you probably heard last week of a terrible tragedy. Comedian Robin Williams suddenly passed away by suicide. As we went through the news stories, we began to look at it and like I did you began to see that there was a lot of speculation of why Robin Williams would commit suicide. Some suggest it might have to do with his financial situation. He had been married previously two times and he was $30 million dollars in alimony payments behind. Some suggest that it may have had to do with the fact that he had early onset of Parkinson’s disease and some suggest it was just an accumulation of years of addiction and depression that came together to develop this situation where he felt there was no way out other than suicide. As I went through the articles trying to think about how it might fit with today’s sermon, one thing that kept coming up was this idea of paradox. People kept saying that Robin Williams’ life was a paradox. A paradox is a person or situation exhibiting an apparently contradictory nature. The paradox in Robin Williams’ life was that people would say he was a very funny man. Someone that had the ability to make millions of people laugh but for some reason couldn’t make his own heart very happy. That is the paradox.
Today, as we begin to look in John 12, we begin to see another paradox. Jesus is giving a contradictory-type statement. If we adhere to it though, it would actually give us life everlasting. Life right now and life everlasting. We have been going through the series called The Story, which is God’s story as told through the people, places, and events of the Bible. We have been talking about the New Testament portion of the story. Specifically Jesus’ ministry and his miracles. Over the last few weeks, we talked about Jesus was well known for his teaching. He went around Galilee and the surrounding areas, and he began to attract people because he was so good at what he taught. He had his immediate followers, the band of 12 disciples. He had his extended group of followers that were just people following him out of curiosity. Then he began to attract people from outside the area. What we find today in John 12 starting at verse 20, we find that he began to attract a group of people simply known as the Greeks. That is where we are going to pick up the story. John 12:20. (Scripture read here.)
Jesus is being pursued by this group of people known as the Greeks. We really don’t know a lot about the Greeks other than it says they came up to worship at the feast. Some suspect that the Greeks were intrigued by the Jews because the Jews had such high morals. They were attracted to that. Some also suggest that the Greeks had heard about Jesus, this famous Rabbi, this famous Jewish teacher and decided to pursue him and maybe ask him some philosophical questions. As the story goes, the Greeks came up and first they found Philip who was believed to actually be Greek. Then Philip went and got his friend Andrew. Both Philip and Andrew ended up going to find Jesus. They find Jesus and say Jesus there are some Greeks outside that want to see you. Jesus, as he often does, answers in some sort of a vague esoteric way and he says “I tell you the truth, unless this kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed, but if it dies, it produces many seeds.” You can imagine Andrew and Philip saying come on Jesus. The Greeks are outside. Can you give them something besides this? Is this all you got? We really don’t know what Jesus is alluding to here, but some suspect that he is alluding to his coming crucifixion. It is the idea that just as a seed would fall to the ground and die and produce a stalk of wheat with many seeds, the idea that Jesus when he goes to the cross is going to die and out of his death, burial, and resurrection will come many new lives because the people put their faith in him. We know that is kind of how Paul views it back in Romans. Paul talks about just as sin came through one man, Adam, and resulted in death to many. The death of one man, being Jesus, resulted in life to many. That is kind of the idea that is going on here.
But then he goes on to say something a little bit even more bizarre. He goes on to say “The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” I don’t know if you ever sat down and thought about this passage, but it really doesn’t make any sense at all. Let’s think of it in a job situation. If you really love your job, you are going to lose it, but if you really hate your job, you get to keep it forever. That is basically what he is saying here. That doesn’t sound like a very good deal. As usual, we read this and we really don’t realize that Jesus probably has something else in mind. If we peel away the English text and begin to look at the Greek text, we see that Jesus has something else in mind. Especially when we consider the fact that he is really translation two separate Greek words into the word life. The Greek word psyche and the Greek word zoe. If we plugged it in it would be like this, “The man who loves his life (his psyche) will lose it, while the man who hates his life (his psyche) in this world will keep it for eternal life (zoe).” I don’t know why, but the translators only give it the word life. They only translate it life. The word psyche and the word zoe are two way different meanings of the word life. As a side note, for those who aren’t aware, I know we talk about the Greek and everything else. Just so you know, the original New Testament was written in Greek. If we want to get back to the real meaning behind the words, it is helpful to be able to go back to the Greek. That is why we refer to the Greek. When we peel the English away, we see these two Greek words; psyche and zoe.
Let’s think about psyche. That is the word we get the word psychology from. It is the study of human behavior. The Greeks had something else in mind. Some of the Greeks saw the psyche as the personification of the soul. There was a Greek goddess called Psyche. Unpacking it even further, some Greeks saw this as the self-life. The complete self. It would include your emotions, your relationships, your achievements, your failures, your trials. Pretty much what you would define as your life. That is the sense that some suggest what Jesus is referring to when he uses the word psyche. It is really the life that we wake up to every morning. Each of us wake up to our own bit of psyche. Our own slice of reality. I use the phrase slice of reality because our reality is just a slice of reality. We think that our reality is the only reality out there, but really our reality is pretty much limited. It is limited to how we process all the things that come to us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We process these things and we establish our own reality in our brain that may or may not have some bearing on somebody else’s reality. Whether that is good or bad doesn’t really matter. It is the reality that comes to us and we tend to accept that. When I thought about this idea of reality, it is heavy stuff for today. The first thing that came to my mind was the movie The Truman Show. Does anybody remember The Truman Show with Jim Carrey? It was a movie about a guy whose whole life was lived on a reality TV show. The trouble is everybody knew it but him. From the time he was born to the time he was an adult, he was on a TV show that was being watched by millions of people. Since you guys are such a good audience today and because I have so little content for my sermon, I thought I would show you the trailer for the movie so you could get an idea of what it is about.
When we think about The Truman Show it had a lot of good lines. One of the lines that seemed to stand out to me and I think is very applicable to today’s sermon is that “we accept the reality of the world in which we are presented.” As I thought about it, I thought that is very true. All of us are presented with some form of a reality. I know I am getting a little weird on you and thinking a little bit too hard about this. But every one of us has this life come at us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We are presented with certain things. We are born to a certain family. We are raised in a certain town. We end up going to a certain school. We take on a certain job. Marrying somebody. Living in a certain community. All these things coming at us become part of our reality. The funny thing is even though two people could grow up in the same family, the same town, and go to the same school, why do they process that reality differently? They process it differently because they have a different personality. They have a different part of themselves inside of them that begins to think things differently. As they process the things that come through life at their own pace, at their own ability, with their own personality, all of a sudden those things become the lens that they look at life. We all have our lens that we look through life. Because it is something that we get when we are born and goes away when we die, it is basically a temporary lens on life. Thinking back to this term psyche that is what we are talking about here. The psyche is really that life primarily between birth and death that we use to process reality. That becomes our lens on reality. That is a rough definition of psyche.
The other word for life is this idea of zoe. If you think psyche is a weird thing to understand, zoe is pretty much impossible. Its borders are unlimited. With psyche you can put borders around it. With zoe you really can’t. You are dealing with something that transcends so many things. Zoe is the life that was never made available until Jesus stepped foot on this earth. You see that clearly in John 10:10 where Jesus says “I have come that they may have life (zoe) and have it to the full.” Jesus is coming from heaven and basically offering us this zoe life. It is very difficult to explain what zoe is, but it is easier to explain what it isn’t. The zoe life is not the life that you have created in your head. The zoe life is not the sum of your circumstances. The zoe life is not the sum of your achievements, your failures, your stinking thinking about yourself, which many of you do. That is not the zoe life. That is a false life. That is not the true life. The zoe life is the true life that Jesus Christ comes and offers. A life that is not limited by age. It is not limited by gender. It is not limited by political affiliation. It is not limited by any of those things. It is something that is characterized by things like unconditional love, like grace, like freedom, like peace. These are the things that characterize the zoe life. Unlike the psyche life that is pretty much bound by time, the zoe life is timeless. That is why you see the zoe life often attached to the word eternal. In fact, we see it very clearly in John 3:16 where John writes “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life (eternal zoe).” When we think about eternal, we think about something that is sequential. What you have to understand about zoe life is it stands outside of time. It has been there ever since the beginning and will be there ever until the end. It stands outside of time.
Here you have Jesus basically suggesting a choice between two things. The psyche life; the temporary life that is often characterized by a false sense of self or false sense of reality, and this timeless zoe life that is just characterized by all the complete goodness of God. The psyche is a slice of reality. Zoe is the pie itself. Another way to think of it is think about psyche life as the life of a wave. Think about the waves on the ocean that come and go. The psyche life is the wave. The life of peace and calm underneath is the zoe life. Think about it in terms of weather. The psyche life is the storm, the tornado, the hurricane, the rain. The zoe life is the beautiful blue sky that never changes at all. Do you see the difference there? Jesus is saying the zoe life is the true life. It is the real life. He offers that as the better life. You begin to think how is it I am going to get access to this thing called zoe. As we revisit John 12, we see what it involves. It says “The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” What we see here is that the psyche life is something that we have a tendency to love. In fact, the word love here is not romantic love. It is more like brotherly love. It is more like an affectionate love for somebody else. It is a love you find yourself attached to. He is basically saying don’t attach yourself too much to this psyche life that you have created in your mind or wherever. Just like that, it is going to slip away. It is going to be gone. Don’t attach yourself to that life because it is not the real life. It is not the true life. In fact, he goes on to say that you need to actually hate that life. As we know, hate is a very strong word. We don’t like to use the word hate. As I said before, when Jesus talks, he uses this thing called hyperbole which is really an exaggeration to make his point. He is saying you need to hate that life. In this particular sense, hate has the idea of not trying to kill yourself or anything like that. Hate has the idea of surrender or letting go. It is the idea that you need to learn to let go of that life that you have created. That false reality that is in your mind that you tend to want to cling on to. Then he implies if you are to do this sort of thing, if you are to not love it, not cling to it, willing to hate it, willing to let it go, the odd thing about it is you get to keep it for eternal life. That is where it gets a little bit difficult to explain. It really doesn’t make a lot of sense. You want to get rid of it but you want to keep it. My understanding of it is it really has this idea of a change of quality of life. The psyche in itself is not bad. The psyche is generally considered the self. We include all the other circumstances of life but it is the self. The personality. The personality itself is not a bad thing. What he is saying is that is okay but what you need to do is learn to tap into the zoe life. When you tap into the zoe life that Christ offers, your life begins to take on a new sort of life. A different quality of life. A better quality of life. You begin to actually look like Jesus and then that becomes the life that is not only good for now but will carry on for all eternity. I think that is the essence of what Jesus is saying here. He is suggesting we need to let go of some things. We need to become unattached to some of the things in the world because the bottom line is we are going to lose those things anyway.
What is the answer? How do you get to it? What it boils down to is what we talked about a few weeks ago when I used the verse out of Matthew 6:33. It said “Seek first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added to you.” What we are talking about here is really a matter of priorities. If you put your focus on the God life, the zoe life, the life that Jesus came to give to us, what happens is you get to keep the other life too. It becomes a better life. It becomes a very good life. If you put the focus all on the psyche life, specifically the life that you have allowed your head to create by virtue of where you have lived and all your thoughts and all this stuff that is going through your mind then that is all you get. And you are going to lose that anyway. It is a matter of priorities. I don’t have a whole lot more to say with this passage. It is really probably more than I was ready to say because when I got into it I realized this was some deep stuff. I am not even sure I understand it totally. But if anything I leave you with is the idea that hopefully I have peaked your curiosity a little bit. There are some of you out there that actually believe that maybe Jesus is offering some sort of a higher quality of life than the life you are living. Also to think about the fact and just consider the fact that your slice of reality is not reality. It is your perception of reality because you have processed it through your senses, your eyes, your nose, your mouth, your mind. Your reality has no bearing on anybody else’s reality. The reality is that those realities that we create in our mind are far, far, far deficient compared with the reality that Jesus Christ wants to offer us. A reality that will better equip us to deal with the problems of this life and be able to go on with this for life eternal.
In closing, I have been thinking about how does this tie back to Robin Williams? What I realized is that Robin Williams was a funny man, he was a talented man, he was a wealthy man, he was loved by millions, but he couldn’t make himself happy. He couldn’t fill that something inside of him. There was something inside of him that was just unable to make him smile inside of his very soul. I was thinking about making this whole sermon about a repeat of a sermon I did about a year and a half ago on depression. I thought this is a good opportunity because everybody is talking about depression. But I realized I don’t want to talk about depression. If you want to listen to the sermon on depression I think it was back in January 2013. I covered it pretty intensively. I am not here today to minimize the fact that many people in this room, if the statistics are true probably more than half of you, suffer with some form of depression. I am not here to minimize that. I am here to say that I think the saddest thing about depression and it is the one truth about depression that I think I can say 100% is that it basically creates a distorted picture of reality. For Robin Williams to hang himself in his room, the guy had to have a distorted view of reality. Granted, it could have been caused by depression. It could have been caused by circumstance. It doesn’t matter. The reality is he had a distorted view of reality. He was not thinking clearly. He had created this thing in his mind through depression, through chronic addiction, through financial problems, through circumstances, we don’t know, but he had a wrong view of reality and got himself to a point where he could not even think of another way out but suicide. I don’t know his religion. I actually looked it up. It said his dad was Episcopalian. His mom was Christian Scientist. They suggest he was an atheist. When I listen to some of his skits in the day, I think he probably was an atheist or at least an agnostic. That is between him and God. What I can suggest is that if Robin Williams had known about this thing called zoe life that is spelled out fairly clearly in the book of John and throughout all the gospels, he might be alive today. One thing I can say about Robin Williams is he was full of energy. Everybody talked about how much energy the guy had. If he had taken the same amount of energy that he used to pursue his career and used it to pursue God, I would say 99.9% he would be alive today. I say that. I say it to you.
I am sure some people might want to challenge that. I would never say it on Facebook because if you say something like that on Facebook then somebody suggests there goes Chuck just trying to give a pat Christian answer. If you just love Jesus everything will be fine. I am not saying that. What I am saying is that apart from the few people that suffer from chronic depression, clinical depression, I would say that the first weapon in your toolbox for anybody who suffers with occasional depression, a case of the blues, feeling sorry for themselves, whatever it is, the first solution, the first thing you pull out is the seeking God life. The life with God. The pursuit of God. Then the medication. Don’t get me wrong. I am not talking about those people with clinical depression. I am talking about the people that just seem like they have a hard time getting through life so they decide to pop the pills. I know. I have been there. I was on Zoloft 15-20 years ago. I suffer with depression. Not clinical depression. Not extreme depression, but I know what it is like. I know that it works. If I can pull myself out of the self-imposed pity party, the false reality that I have managed to create in my head and I begin to pursue God with every bit of my being whatever that looks like, I feel better. I feel a lot better. It works. What I am saying is we either believe Jesus or we don’t. When he offers us something called zoe life, it is something that he wants to make available to us. Like anything else, we have to practice it. We have to pursue it. We have to desire it. We have to hunger for it. That is the only thing that will be able to dismantle the false reality that we have created in our head and create the true reality that is more in line with Jesus Christ and the life that he wants to give us right now and for all eternity. Let us pray.
