"The righteous Man is inconvenient to us" Holy Tuesday 2026

31. March 2026
Holy Tuesday

"Let us lie in wait for the righteous Man, because He is inconvenient to us."

That is the voice of the conspirators in Wisdom, and it is an honest confession. They are not pretending to be virtuous. They know exactly what they are doing and why. The righteous Man is inconvenient. He reproaches their sins. His manner of life is unlike theirs. The very sight of Him is a burden. So they have made up their minds: He must go.

You might be tempted to read those men as the villains of the story and yourself as a bystander. But stay with the word inconvenient. Every one of us has found Jesus inconvenient at some point — His claim on our time, His call to die to what we want, His refusal to be the kind of Savior we would have designed. We have all wanted a Jesus who costs less. Who asks less. Who fits more neatly into the life we have already arranged. The conspirators spoke aloud what the rest of us are thinking silently.

And Jeremiah knew this long before any of them. "I was like a docile lamb brought to the slaughter, and I did not know that they had devised schemes against me." (Jeremiah 11:19) Jeremiah, innocent, betrayed by the men of his own town, was handed over to those who wanted him dead. He is a figure of the one who would come after him. But notice: Jeremiah did not know. He was a lamb who did not see the knife. Jesus is not Jeremiah in that respect. Jesus knows exactly what is coming, and He walks toward it anyway.

When the Greeks come asking to see Jesus, something shifts. They come to Philip — a Jewish disciple with a Greek name, from the border country of Bethsaida — and they say: "Sir, we wish to see Jesus." (John 12:21) It is a simple request. Philip takes it to Andrew, and Andrew and Philip take it to Jesus. And Jesus does not say: “Bring them in, here I am.” He says: "The hour has come that the Son of Man should be glorified." (John 12:23)

The arrival of Gentiles at His door is the signal. The harvest is here. The world has come looking for Him. But for there to be a harvest, the grain must fall. "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain." (John 12:24)

One grain of wheat, alone in a hand, stays exactly what it is: one grain. Nothing grows from it. No one is fed by it. It is preserved and sterile. But put it in the ground, let it die, let the hull split open in the dark — and from that death comes a stalk, and from the stalk, dozens of grains. The death is not the tragedy. The death is the condition of everything that follows.

Jesus is that grain. He will not be preserved. He will not remain alone.

And now the Law presses hard. "He who loves his life will lose it" (John 12:25). That is not a comfort. It is a mirror. You love your life. So do I. We all have the instinct of the single grain that wants to stay intact — to hold on to what we have, to protect ourselves from loss, to manage carefully the little portion of existence we have been given. That instinct runs deep. It is not evil in itself, but it becomes the shape of unbelief when it runs up against Christ. Because the life He offers cannot be received by hands that are clenched around what they already hold.

But here is where we must be careful. Jesus is not commanding you to manufacture your own death to self, to perform the act of losing your life as a spiritual discipline that earns you the other kind. That is the law used as a ladder, and it does not reach. The grain does not heroically leap into the soil. The grain is planted.

"Now My soul is troubled, and what shall I say? 'Father, save Me from this hour'? But for this purpose I came to this hour." (John 12:27)

Hear that carefully. His soul is genuinely troubled. The weight of what is coming lands on Him as it would land on any man of flesh and blood. And then He does not ask the Father to remove it. He says, “This is why I came.” Not only to this moment, but into flesh altogether. The Incarnation was aimed at this hour from before the foundations of the world.

The Father answers from heaven: "I have both glorified it and will glorify it again." (John 12:28) The crowd hears thunder. Some say an angel spoke. Jesus says the voice came for their sake, not His. The Father is speaking over the noise of the crowd, over the confusion of people who want a king and cannot understand why this one keeps talking about dying.

"Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be cast out. And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all peoples to Myself." (John 12:31–32)

This is the Gospel that the Law was pressing toward. The inconvenient righteous Man is not defeated when He is lifted up. He wins when He is lifted up. The conspirators reasoned that if the righteous Man is God's Son, God will deliver Him from His adversaries before the end. They were testing Him — they expected God to intervene before the cross. They did not understand that the cross is the intervention.

The ruler of this world, the one who held the power of death over every grave and every conscience, is cast out precisely at the moment the grain falls into the ground. The lifting up of Christ in crucifixion is the casting down of everything that condemned you. The death that looks like defeat is the act by which He draws all peoples — Jew and Greek, ancient and modern, the pious and the conspicuously wicked — to Himself.

He draws you to Himself. Not to a memory. Not to an example. To Himself. To the One who is lifted up. To the One who produces much grain from His own death. The drawing in is His work, not yours. You did not find your way to Him by loving your life less heroically than others. You were drawn. The cross is magnetic. The lifted Christ pulls you in.

Mary understood none of this in the way we can explain it. She simply took the costly oil and poured it over His feet and wiped them with her hair, and the whole house filled with the fragrance. Jesus said: she has kept this for the day of My burial. She was anointing a corpse in advance, and she did not know it. But she gave what she had to the Man whose feet would walk to the cross, and Jesus called it good.

The house was filled with the fragrance. The smell of that ointment would have clung to everything — the walls, the clothes, the hair of everyone at the table. You cannot be in that room and remain unchanged by it. The sacrifice of Christ works the same way. You cannot stand at this altar, in this week, under the shadow of the cross and remain merely a spectator. The fragrance gets into everything.

Judas was at that table too. He smelled the same ointment. He heard the same words. He had the money box in his hands and was already calculating. You are not Judas. But you know what it is to be present where grace is poured out and to be mentally somewhere else entirely — counting your denarii, managing your life, quietly weighing whether Christ is worth the inconvenience.

He knew He was inconvenient. He came anyway. The grain fell anyway. And on the other side of that death, there is much fruit — more than any of us could have produced by clinging to what we had.

"Walk while you have the light," He says. "Believe in the light, that you may become sons of light." (John 12:35–36) He will be hidden from them soon enough. The cross comes before Easter morning. But you are standing in the light right now. The lifted Christ is drawing you. The fragrance of His sacrifice is in this place. That is what He came to this hour for.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Rev. Christopher R. Gillespie
St. John Ev. Lutheran Church & School - Sherman Center
Random Lake, Wisconsin