Offended by the Right Things: The Scandal and Beauty of the Cross in John 12

From the sermon preached on November 1, 2026 | The Unavoidable Jesus | Buried and Broken

Talk with people in this city about faith and you’ll hear honest reasons for keeping their distance: hypocrisy among Christians, especially Christian leaders, or a tribal, bigoted, politically weaponized Jesus. Those objections are understandable, and sometimes the most honest reply is, “Yeah, I don’t believe in that Jesus either.” But there’s another group too: people who believe, more or less, that Jesus loves them and died for their sins, and whose lives haven’t really been changed by that forgiveness. Both raise the same uncomfortable question: have you ever actually been confronted by the real Jesus? In John 12, as Jesus walks toward the cross, he shows exactly what is offensive about him, and why the same thing is also the most beautiful thing in the world.

This past Sunday at Apostles Church Uptown, Pastor John Starke continued our series The Unavoidable Jesus with a sermon titled “Buried and Broken,” preaching from John 12:20-36. It was Marathon Sunday, when just crossing Manhattan takes some creativity (John admitted it took him four buses to get there). [INTERNAL LINK: The Unavoidable Jesus sermon series on /sermons] His summary of the problem is worth sitting with: some people are offended by the wrong Jesus, and others aren’t offended enough by the real one.

He’s both, and John’s Gospel won’t let you pick one. In John 4, Jesus crosses social boundaries to offer living water to a Samaritan woman. Two chapters earlier, in John 2, he walks into the temple, overturns tables, and drives out the money changers. Not a very churchy thing to do. In John 5, he heals a man who had been crippled for 38 years, without even being asked, and then in the same chapter confronts the religious leaders for not understanding their own Bible. In John 8 he tells a woman facing stoning, “Neither do I condemn you” (John 8:11), and later in the same chapter warns the crowd that whoever sins is enslaved to sin (John 8:34).

The wrong way to read all this is to decide that the comfort is for people like me and the confrontation is for people unlike me. It’s an easy habit in New York: you scroll the news on the 6 train and file every hard word from Jesus under the people in the other party or the other neighborhood. But if you’re not both offended and comforted by Jesus, you’re missing something fundamental to Christianity, and you may not have been changed by it at all.
John 12 brings both to the surface. Jesus is emotionally close to the cross now. “Now is my soul troubled,” he says (John 12:27). Pastor John said that without both the offense and the comfort, the comfort will be fleeting and the confrontation will just crush you. So he walked through three things: the scandal of the cross, the challenge of the cross, and the beauty of the cross.

It’s the week of Passover in Jerusalem, just after Jesus rode in on a donkey. Some Greeks come to Philip and say, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus” (John 12:21). Philip doesn’t know what to do with that, so he goes to Andrew, and together they take it to Jesus. Jesus doesn’t say “bring them in,” and he doesn’t say “send them away.” He answers with something that sounds unrelated: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” (John 12:23).

All through John, Jesus has been saying that his hour hasn’t come yet, even to his mother at the wedding in John 2. His hour is the cross. So why now? Verse 31 gives a hint: “Now is the judgment of this world” (John 12:31).

That sounds strange next to John 3:16, where God so loved the world that he gave his Son. But “world” is a slippery word in John’s writings. In 1 John 2:15, John tells his readers not to love the world. He doesn’t mean the people around you. He means the values and systems we organize our lives around. The cross is a judgment on those.

Look at who is where. The Greeks were outsiders at the most Jewish of feasts. At the temple they would have run into a wall, kept out in the Gentile courts, far from the action. So they went looking for Jesus. Meanwhile the insiders, the religious leaders, had been plotting since John 11 to kill him, because he threatened their power and their place. The insiders want Jesus dead; the outsiders want to know him. It’s flipped.

The world’s vision of the good life is “have more, need less.” More power, so you’re less vulnerable. More attention, so you know you’re somebody. More comfort, which is what so much of our technology is now for (can I get this in a day, with one click?). More money, so you can protect yourself from life’s uncertainties. We organize our careers around advancement, our finances around independence, our relationships around fulfillment, and our schedules around convenience. Then Jesus says his greatest glory will come through being stripped, rejected, humiliated, and crucified.

So if you’re offended by Jesus, are you at least offended by the right things?

This is where it gets personal. You can hear “judgment on the world” and think: the world is out there, not me. I’m here at church. I even made it on Marathon Sunday. But in verses 24-26, Jesus turns that judgment toward the people following him.

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). First, Jesus is describing himself. Unless he is buried and broken open, we don’t get the fruit of his life. A seed in your hand is a small, forgettable thing. It isn’t meant to stay a seed. Buried and opened up, it becomes what it was made to be. For Jesus, the burial is the whole purpose of his life.

And that means if you’re with Jesus, you can’t understand your own life apart from his death.

“Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (John 12:25). This is where we should be offended.

“Hate” is another tricky word in the Gospels. In Luke 14, Jesus says that unless you hate your father and mother and your own life, you cannot be his disciple (Luke 14:26). Yet elsewhere he confronts religious leaders for not honoring their parents, and he famously tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves. So which is it?

Pastor John focused on one thread. What Jesus criticizes is loving the unburied, unbroken seed life: a life that stays intact, where nothing is taken and everything is protected. It survives, but it stays alone and never becomes what it was meant to be. Comfort, success, recognition, wealth, and security aren’t evil. But when they become the organizing center of your life, they deform you. We become comfortable but less capable of love, more successful but less generous, more secure but less willing to trust, more independent but less capable of intimacy. We get extraordinarily skilled at preserving a life that is becoming less and less worth living.

Pastor John offered a test question. Not “if my career keeps going this way” or “if I keep this much money,” but: if your life with Christ, as it’s organized right now, keeps going the way it’s going, is that the life you want? Or is it turning into a life that will, in the end, remain alone?

The lowest-hanging fruit, he said, is joining in the life of God’s people. These ordinary, unglamorous acts of self-giving put little cracks in the shell: serving on a team, joining Dream Center to serve our neighbors, giving generously so that you can say to your money, “You are not what keeps me safe.” It means showing up in a community group or at a men’s or women’s breakfast, hearing people’s needs, and praying for them. An older Christian once told Pastor John that if your life is never shaped to regularly and sacrificially love people, it isn’t a cross-shaped life. It isn’t a Christian life.

Don’t respond to that challenge by gritting your teeth: “From now on I’m going to show up, and I’m going to like it.” The only way to receive it fruitfully is to see the beauty of the cross. “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32). We tend to assume “lifted up” means the resurrection or the ascension, but John clarifies: “He said this to show by what kind of death he was going to die” (John 12:33). It’s the death of Jesus that has to draw you.

That sounds ironic. A Roman crucifixion was a public spectacle meant to make you look away and think, this is what happens when you cross the line. Jesus flips it: see me, see the beauty of this, and want to do what I did.

Think of someone who has been blind and suddenly gains sight. You don’t have to order them to go look at a sunset, the mountains, or the ocean. They’re drawn to it. In the same way, the cross can’t drive you. It has to draw you. It can’t just be that your parents were Christians, or that you’re temperamentally a rule-follower, or that it’s what your community does.

Why is the cross beautiful? Because Jesus had infinite joy and intimacy with the Father, the love the Father voiced over him at his baptism. If the seed had stayed safe, he would have been the only one who knew that love. Instead he was buried. On the cross he cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46), and went through the abyss and aloneness our sin deserves. He was buried into nothingness in love so that we might be buried into his glory.
And you didn’t earn it. Like the man in John 5 who never asked to be healed and seemed indifferent afterward, you aren’t what provoked the cross. It came from the overflowing love in Jesus’ heart. Let the cross confront you, and then let it melt you.

At Apostles Uptown we gather Sunday mornings at Regis High School, 60 East 85th Street, and our community groups meet in East Harlem, Washington Heights, Hamilton Heights, Morningside Heights, and the Upper West Side. In a city that rewards people who stay intact, protected, and impressive, this is a place where you can stop performing. Come as you are. You don’t have to have it figured out to start letting your shell crack open among people who are learning the same thing.

Maybe you’ve kept your distance from Jesus because of the wrong Jesus, the hypocritical or weaponized one. Or maybe you’ve believed in him so casually that he’s never really offended you. Either way, the real Jesus is waiting at the cross, and he confronts and comforts at once. Stare straight at the offense, and let the beauty draw you in. He was buried into nothingness in love so that you might be buried into his glory.

Did this raise questions about who Jesus is and whether he can be trusted? Taking the next step starts with a simple visit. Plan your visit below:

Or start with our weekly newsletter, which follows this sermon series and shares about the life of our church. Sign up here.