Many of you have likely seen the TV show, “Undercover Boss.” It’s a fascinating and moving show in which corporate executives and CEO’s go undercover to serve as entry level employees in their own companies. After working undercover for a week and getting to know some of their employees, the executives reveal their true identities to the employees and reward them for their hard work with money or trips or something along those lines.

The premise of the show is directly related to its popularity, for the great complaint one often hears against CEO’s and the like from their lower level workers is that the CEO’s are distant, that they do not know or truly understand what their employees go through and that they profit off of the hard work of the employees when (it is often alleged) they themselves do not know how to do the work or could not do it themselves if they had to. In other words, the complaint one often hears from workers against their bosses is a complaint concerning empathy.

Empathy refers to the ability to understand what other people are feeling. Employees eventually come to resent bosses who have no empathy. Most of all, they come to resent bosses that do not even posses the capability of empathy since those bosses (in their minds) do not understand what their employees go through.

Again, the popularity of the show “Undercover Boss” is based on the fact that the bosses bridge the empathy gap, become one of their employees, live in their worlds, eat their food, experience their trials and difficulties and come to understand who their employees are. “Undercover Boss” is about CEO’s and bosses who experience precisely what their workers experience. The result is that the bosses come to appreciate what the workers are going through and the workers gain a new respect for their bosses in knowing that their bosses have intentionally taken on their own struggles.

Nobody likes the distant boss who demands from his employees something that he himself cannot even begin to understand.

Quite honestly, there were probably some in the crowd who instinctively thought this when Jesus, in last week’s text from John 12, said:

²⁴ Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. ²⁵ Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. ²⁶ If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him.

I wonder: when the crowd first heard this (and, I wonder, when you first heard this), did they (or you) think, “Well, ok! That’s easy for you to say! You’re Jesus. You’re the wise one. It’s easy for you to ask us to die like a grain of wheat so that we can bear fruit. It’s easy for you to talk about us losing our lives so that we might gain them. It’s easy for you, Jesus, to demand sacrifices of us. After all, we’ve had people demanding that we sacrifice everything for our entire lives. It’s easy for you to ask for this, Jesus. We will have to bear the pain. You’re asking something of us that you yourself cannot understand. You do not know what it is to suffer under a burden like this. The boss never really knows the pain of the underlings.”

I wonder if some in the original crowd felt this way. I bet they did. I wonder also if any of you feel this way: that God asks more of us than He should, that the Lord is a distant boss handing down demands for our lives that He cannot understand, that it is somehow easy for Jesus to ask us to die because, after all, He’s Jesus and we’re struggling human beings.

Ladies and gentlemen, our text this morning is going to reveal something amazing. It is going to reveal that our Lord and God does not hand down edicts without empathy, without understanding. Our text is going to reveal that Jesus does indeed call us to die to self, but that He is not without understanding concerning that to which He calls us. More than anything, our text is going to reveal that Jesus’ resolve to bring glory to the Father was greater than Jesus’ struggle over the horrendous trial He was about to undergo.

Our passage this morning begins with an empathetic confession from Jesus:

 ^27a “Now is my soul troubled.

“Now is my soul troubled.” There is amazing empathy in these words. Jesus’ soul is troubled as He reflects on His coming crucifixion. I do not believe Jesus was exaggerating for dramatic effect. I do not believe He was saying this with a wink to Heaven, as if, while telling the crowd He was troubled, He whispers to the Father, “Not really!”

No, Jesus is troubled. The word “troubled” means, “revulsion, horror, anxiety, agitation.”[1] In a sense, we have a mini Gethsemane here. Here is Jesus’ acknowledgment of His own pain. The Lord Jesus was God and man. The Lord Jesus understood and understands all that He asked and asks of His people.

His pain is amplified in the next phrase:

^27b And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’?

There is a question concerning how best to translate and read this verse. He asks a question, “And what shall I say?” Then He answers it, “Father, save me from this hour.”

The confusion comes in when we ask whether the words, “Father, save me from this hour,” constitute a question, as many of your Bibles will reflect, or a statement or exclamation. In other words, is Jesus saying:

(a)    And what shall I say? “Father, save me from this hour”?

or

(b)   And what shall I say? “Father, save me from this hour!”

The text can be translated and read either way. For my part, I agree with New Testament scholar D.A. Carson that it is likely best to read this as an exclamation and not a rhetorical question. It should probably read, “Father, save me from this hour!” Carson’s position is that if this is a question, Jesus is offering merely “a hypothetical possibility: ‘Shall I say, “Father, save me from his hour?”’” Carson suggests that if this is the case, and if Jesus is merely offering a hypothetical, then “what is troubling Jesus in the first clause of the verse is given no substance. If the question is only hypothetical and instantly rejected, the ‘trouble’ is merely reported and then instantly resolved.” He then goes on to say, rightly, I believe, that if this is a “positive prayer” (“Father, save me from this hour!”), it is completely consistent with Jesus’ Gethsemane prayer in Mark 14:36, “Take this cup from me.”[2]

However you read that, you must not read it as somehow lessening the “trouble” Jesus speaks of in the beginning of v.27. It was indeed trouble: terrible, attacking, horrifying trouble. We find here a very real Jesus experiencing very real trouble as He contemplates a very real and very brutal death. More than the physical ordeal ahead of Him, though, Jesus faced head-on the horrifying prospect of taking into Himself the sins of rebellious mankind.

This is important for two reasons. It is important first of all because it shows us that Jesus experienced more pain than any of us could possibly experience, for while He calls on us to become like a grain of wheat that is buried and dies so it can bear much fruit, He never calls on us to do what He Himself alone could do: bear the sins of the world and pay the awful penalty for them. Let us be clear on this: not only does Jesus experience trouble at the thought of dying, He experiences it on a level that we will never understand because His death and His suffering was qualitatively different from what ours is or ever will be. Jesus asks His followers to become a grain of wheat that is buried and then rises again. Jesus never asks His followers to bear the pain that He Himself could alone bear.

But there is a second and simpler reason why this is important. It means that while Jesus’ troubled spirit knew greater pain than we know, it did not know less pain. That is, whatever pain or trouble it costs you to die to self, Jesus understands it perfectly.

Jesus is not a distant, dispassionate, non-empathetic CEO who asks those beneath Him to shoulder burdens He cannot understand. On the contrary, in His incarnation Jesus comes among us, lives among us and experiences our trials and our pains. Jesus empathizes with humanity. Jesus understands. In Hebrews 4, the writer of that book writes:

¹⁵For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.

So when Jesus tells His followers that they must be willing to lose their lives to gain their lives, He is not playing with words. He knows how terrifying that prospect is, for He was “troubled” as He faced His cross.

Oh, church, do you understand the incalculable value of having a Savior who knows what it is to be troubled, to feel pain, to struggle under the load of what He was called to do in obedience of God? Many, many years ago, in the fifth century, the Patriarch of Alexandria, Cyril of Alexandria, wrote of the importance of this reality:

“Unless [Jesus] had felt dread, human nature could not have become free of dread. Unless he had experienced grief, there could have never been any deliverance from grief. Unless he had been troubled and alarmed, there would have been no escape from these feelings. Every one of the emotions to which human nature is liable can be found in Christ. The emotions of his flesh were aroused, not that they might gain the upper hand, as indeed they do in us, but in order that when aroused they might be thoroughly subdued by the power of the Word dwelling in the flesh, human nature as a whole thus undergoing a change for the better.”[3]

Our struggles and fears and pain are redeemed in the troubled soul of Jesus. We may never say of our God, “He does not understand what He asks of me! He does not know what His commands will cost!”

He does! Jesus was troubled, deeply, as He contemplated what it would mean to fulfill the Father’s calling.

And what did Jesus do? Listen and stand amazed:

^27c But for this purpose I have come to this hour. ²⁸ Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” ²⁹ The crowd that stood there and heard it said that it had thundered. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” ³⁰ Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not mine.

Behold Jesus’ resolve for the Father’s glory in the face of His own pain! He is troubled, but His troubles do not overpower His resolve. He is tempted to flee, but He does not flee. Our Savior empathizes with us in His struggle then He leads us by overcoming His struggle with resolve and obedience. This was no easy thing, but this was the right thing.

Jesus elevates God’s glory over His own struggle. In doing so, He gave us an example for our lives. The peace that the Son had in obeying the Father was greater than the trouble He felt over what it would cost to obey Him. So it can be and should be with us.

In Dante Alighieri’s Paradiso, Piccarda Donati says to Dante, “la sua voluntade e nostra pace.”[4] Translated, that says, “His will is our peace.”

God’s will is our peace! God’s glory is our peace! And either we will have peace in the Father’s will and glory or we will have misery in seeing our own wills and glory.

So Jesus resolves to embrace the cross. The cross was His calling. In doing so, He pronounces a kind of judgment on the world.

³¹ Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out.

To be sure, as John 3:17 says, “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him,” but the announcement of the cross was, in a sense, an announcement of judgment as well. For while the crucified-and-resurrected Christ would save all who trusted in Him, the crucified-and-resurrected Christ would judge those who rejected Him and His great saving work. To reject the salvation of the cross and the empty tomb is to invite and embrace judgment.

Specifically, Jesus says, “now will the ruler of this world be cast out.” This is a title for Satan, the Devil, in many places in the New Testament. For instance, in Matthew 4:8-9 Satan presents himself as the ruler of the world when he takes Jesus to a high mountain, shows Him “all the kingdoms of the world and their glory” and says to Jesus, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.”

In 2 Corinthians 4:4, Satan is called “the god of this world.” In Ephesians 2:2 he is called “the prince of the power of the air.” In Ephesians 6:12, Paul writes:

“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”

The cross and empty tomb spelled the end for the Devil. He may have rejoiced at the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus, but His rejoicing was short lived. On the cross, Jesus paid the price for the sins of lost mankind. In His empty tomb, Jesus defeated sin, death and hell. The cross was the payment. The empty tomb was the confirmation. In defeating the schemes of the devil, Jesus could say, “Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out.”

So the cross brings judgment on the Devil and on the rejecting world, but the cross brings salvation and hope to the world as well, as Jesus revealed next:

³² And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” ³³ He said this to show by what kind of death he was going to die.

On the cross, Jesus is offered to the world. Jesus is offered to “all people.”

When Jesus says, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself,” He does not mean that all people are saved. We know this because, in the verses that follow, Jesus warns the people to believe while they still can. This rules out the possibility of everybody being saved. Furthermore, the Bible is quite clear in multiple places that there is a Heaven and a Hell and not everybody will be saved. Clearly what He means here is that salvation is offered to everybody in the world and those who come will be saved.

This is a great and glorious truth! The Son is lifted up from the earth (that is, He is crucified) and He stands as an offer to the earth to come and live and be saved. That means that Jesus has been offered on the cross to each and every one of you assembled here today. He is the cosmic Christ!

May I show you a picture that is meaningful to me? It hangs in my office today.

This painting was done by a friend of mine, a deacon at the first church I pastored right out of seminary in Woodstock, GA. I was amazed to discover that my friend Anthony had artistic talents. He did not like to be asked to paint, but he agreed to when I asked him if he would take a shot at a rendition of Salvador Dali’s 1954 painting, “Corpus Hypercubus.”

When he brought it to me, I was amazed. It is a different kind of painting, and I have on occasion had a person here or there tell me that they do not appreciate non-traditional depictions of the crucifixion. For myself, I love it. I love it for three reasons. I love it because a friend made it for me. I love it because it depicts the cosmic cross being offered up for the cosmos. And I love it because of who my friend Anthony was and is.

Anthony is a wonderful man. We haven’t spoken in some time, but I am forever grateful for the kindness he showed me as a deacon and as a friend. He was a great help to me.

More than anything, I’m touched by the fact that Anthony, the man who painted this for me, was the crime scene photographer for the city of Atlanta for many, many years. He retired while I was his pastor and he shared with me about the rigors of that job. He shared with me that for 20-30 years (I don’t remember exactly), he photographed almost every murder scene in the city of Atlanta. He shared with me briefly some of the things he had seen. I say “briefly” because he could not talk at length about the horrors of what he had seen, and, in truth, he did not need to. For over 20 years he saw and photographed unspeakable images of murder, violence, bloodshed, and horror. His job was to photograph the wickedness and depravity and evil of man. It did not leave him untouched and unscarred. How could it? I felt for my friend for what he had seen, and I still wonder how any one person can handle having to see so much ugliness in the world. My friend Anthony handled it better than I would have, but I shudder to think about what his eyes had witnessed.

So that’s why I love this painting. When I think about Anthony, the crime scene photographer, painting that image, it occurs to me that the beauty of the cross outshines the horrors of the Devil. I think that whatever terrors my friend Anthony saw, they do not match the wonder and grandeur of the cosmic Christ.

My friend washed his eyes out with Christ crucified and exalted. It too was a crime scene, was it not? On the cross the sins of mankind crucified the sinless Lamb of God. But it was not merely a crime scene. For Jesus was placed on the cross by the Father’s will as well. The Father is not a criminal. The Father called His Son to the cross to save the world from itself, from the devil, from sin, death and hell.

³² And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

See Christ lifted up on the cross. See Christ emerging from the tomb of death, alive and victorious. Jesus invites us to see Him, then He invites us to come.

First, we see the shock of the crowd at the idea that Jesus would have to suffer and die.

³⁴ So the crowd answered him, “We have heard from the Law that the Christ remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?”

Jesus’ response reveals not only that, yes, the Christ must suffer and die, but also that the world must embrace this Christ in faith so that it might live.

³⁵ So Jesus said to them, “The light is among you for a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you. The one who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going. ³⁶ While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light.”

Jesus is the light. His crucifixion will not extinguish the light forever. On the third day after the crucifixion, the light will shine again, even out of the tomb of death. Jesus calls on the people to believe.

³⁶ While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light.

There is a note of urgency here: “While you have the light…”

There is a note of need here: “…believe in the light…”

There is a note of victory here: “…that you may become sons of light.”

It is true! This Jesus must suffer and die. He will show what it is for a grain of wheat to fall into the ground and die. And, like a grain of wheat, He will bear much fruit after dying and being buried.

And we, lost and groping in the darkness, can come to the light, embrace the light, step into the light and live! We live by dying to self, by repenting of all that we have been and all that we are and coming into the presence of the Most High God.

“While you have the light…”

“…believe in the light…”

“…that you may become sons of light.”

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