Seeing Jesus: A Sermon

Text: John 12: 20-33

I want to begin with two scenes, both taken from the twelfth chapter of John’s gospel. I invite you to imagine them with me, to try to feel what it would have been like to be there, to picture yourself within each of these scenes. Where do you find yourself in it? How does it feel to be there? Do any sights, smells, sounds, or emotions stand out to you as you experience each of these scenes with your imagination? 

Scene One:

It is just six days before the Passover festival, and Jesus is sitting down at a table in Bethany for a dinner in his honour. Surrounded by friends, Jesus and his disciples are enjoying a sumptuous feast—the aromas of favourite foods fill the warm night air, peals of laughter ring out, and the warm glow of lamplight gives everything a golden air. It’s the kind of night that all of us treasure—a night shared with our closest friends, enjoying the kinds of memories that don’t quickly fade. Sitting with them at the table is Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead—literally, Jesus had called him out of the tomb after he had been lying there in his grave clothes for four days. His presence there on this night, eating and laughing alongside the others, is a reminder that this is no ordinary celebration. Later, Mary will pour a pound of costly perfume over Jesus’ feet, washing them with her hair, the only way she can think of that even begins to express the magnitude of the gratitude she feels toward this man who has brought life where only days before there had been death and grief. It is a night that none of them will forget for a very long time.

………

Scene Two:

Six days later, and as today’s Gospel text begins we find ourselves with Jesus in Jerusalem at the beginning of the Passover festival. We can sense the crowds of people pressing in all around us. The population of Jerusalem has multiplied exponentially as visitors pour in to the holy city for the festival, as they do every year. But this year is different. This year, everyone is on high alert, and if you listen carefully you can almost sense the tension crackling in the air. What was cause for celebration only a few days ago—the raising of Lazarus from the dead—has now come to the attention of the religious authorities, who are alarmed at the crowds who now want to acclaim Jesus as King of the Jews. Now, rumour has it, they are seeking both Jesus and Lazarus, some even calling for their deaths—and the disciples and others close to Jesus worry about where all of this is leading. Danger seems to lurk in every shadow, every loud noise causes them to jump, and yet none of this will dissuade Jesus from showing up at the festival as planned. Everyone is on high alert.

……...

There is such a stark contrast between the two scenes that I’ve just described, isn’t there? One of the things that most strikes me about John 12 is how completely the tables have turned for Jesus and his followers in the space of one week! One moment, we are feasting, completely in awe of Jesus’ power to bring life where there was death and grief; the next, we are standing amidst the pressing crowds wondering with the disciples at what kinds of danger their presence at this Passover festival may bring, afraid for the life of this man who has the ability to do miracles that go beyond even their wildest expectations.

The first scene is compelling—many of us probably find ourselves instinctively wanting to linger there, to imagine ourselves as part of the celebration, breathing in the scents of fine foods and rich perfumes, hearing the echoes of laughter as friends linger around the table, reveling in amazement at being in the very presence in the miraculous.

The second scene might leave us wondering how things have gone so quickly from this mountaintop high to this anxious tension with danger seeming to lurk at every narrow alleyway, astonished at how suddenly celebration and pure goodness can turn into fear and distress. We may find ourselves wondering why Jesus insists on being at the festival, and doesn’t simply withdraw to a quiet place away from the current uproar, as he has done so many times before. We may find ourselves wishing that we could go back to the simpler pleasures of that first scene, and skip this second entirely.

And just as, for many of us, it is the first scene that we are drawn to, it is Jesus’ ability to do the miraculous, his ability to defeat even the powers of death themselves by restoring Lazarus to life, that has brought the great crowds wanting to experience a piece of this miracle for themselves that cause such a problem in the second scene. The crowds wanting to see Jesus are growing, as they come in droves hoping to see Lazarus with their own eyes, to get a firsthand sense of who this Jesus person actually is. They can’t help but wonder—if Jesus really did bring a man back from the dead, how does this change the world as they know it? What could that mean for a people living in Roman-occupied Palestine, struggling to eke out a living, living daily under the heavy burdens of foreign occupation, longing for someone powerful enough to bring real change to their daily reality? What could it mean for people who, like us, have known real grief, real loss, real fear for ourselves, our children, and those we love? If Jesus really did bring a man back from the dead once, surely he can do it again! Surely, he can do it for us too!

It’s almost perhaps as if you were to go home from church today and turn on the radio, or switch on the tv, or pull up Facebook on your phone, or check your messages to find that everyone everywhere was talking about the same story—a cure for cancer had been found, one that would quickly and effectively treat every single one of the forms of cancer that we all know too well. Can you imagine what a game-changer that would be—the ability to cheat death in this way? Can you imagine the crowds of people who would flock to receive this new treatment? Can you imagine the hoardes of media who would be lined up waiting their chance to interview the researchers responsible for this game-changing discovery? Can you think of the people you know for whom this would be life-changing?

Unfortunately, that’s not likely to happen today, as much as we all wish it would. But  I can’t help but wonder if it isn’t this very same sort of desire to avoid death that brought the Greek inquirers to seek an audience with Jesus on that day in Jerusalem. It’s not really all that farfetched to wonder if the rumours of a dead man brought back to life might have reached these visitors to Jerusalem, whose Greek accents set them apart from the largely Aramaic-speaking local crowd who have sought Jesus thus far. Perhaps they’ve heard about this man who has demonstrated the ultimate power—power over death itself—and have come to learn more, to find out if this might somehow allow them to also avoid death’s ultimate defeat, or perhaps to beg Jesus to perform a similar miracle for someone they have also loved.

We’ll never actually know, because puzzlingly, in this text that begins with these Greek visitors approaching Philip with their request—“Sir, we wish to see Jesus”—we never actually find out if their requested audience with Jesus ever takes place.

Because when Philip, along with his fellow disciple Andrew, approaches Jesus to tell him of this latest group of curious visitors, Jesus’ response is, frankly, completely puzzling. Puzzling to Philip and Andrew, certainly; puzzling also to the crowds of people standing around them; and, to be honest, puzzling to me, even as I read his words with the benefit of being able to read them with not only hindsight but also degrees in theology on my side.

It’s a simple request, really: “We wish to see Jesus.”

A request that, one might think, would be met with one of two responses: Either “Yes, I’ll see them,” or “Sorry, not today.”

Instead, Jesus responds in a way that anyone who has written any multiple-choice tests will be familiar with: option c, none of the above. Instead of either of the expected responses, he answers Philip and Andrew with words that seem completely out of context for someone who has just demonstrated his own power to bring life to the dead.

While the Greek visitors have come seeking to see a man who has the power to overcome death, Jesus’ response invites those of us who seek to follow him to experience a deeper tension: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” Jesus’ words that follow are filled with tension: tension between death and new life, between losing one’s life and keeping it, loving and hating, light and darkness.

As we draw closer to the end of this Lenten journey, it’s as if we can already feel Jesus slipping away, as he begins to speak about mysteries that we cannot yet fully understand. We want a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response; instead, we receive a series of puzzling paradoxes. We want to understand this man who is so compelling, whose teaching is so attractive, who has demonstrated the ability to perform miracles unlike any we have ever seen before.

Instead, he speaks in images and metaphors that we half understand. After all, here on the prairies, especially, the image of a grain of wheat falling to the earth in order to bear a new crop in its time makes sense to us—but wrapping our minds around the mysteries of how this relates to the Kingdom of God is another thing entirely.

And I wonder if our goal maybe isn’t, after all, to dissect these sayings of Jesus, to wrap our minds around them and keep tugging and unraveling until we can make them into neat, clean theological treatises that we can make logical sense out of and draw neat, clean applications from.

I wonder if, instead, these words of Jesus can become for us an invitation to see Jesus more truly, to allow ourselves to be drawn into the mysterious love of God that exceeds our understanding, to find ourselves held by a story that is greater than we can ever possibly have constructed on our own.

I wonder if there isn’t a spiritual discipline to the letting go, to admitting that there are times when we don’t understand it all, to letting the words of Jesus resound in our heads as we wonder if the thunder that we thought we heard might not actually be the voice of God Almighty after all.

Because we’re called not to cling to our life, but to let it go as we seek to follow in the ways of Jesus. We’re not the ones called to lift Jesus up—he has already been lifted up. Instead, we are invited to allow him to draw us to himself.

As this Lenten season draws to a close, and as Holy Week approaches, I wonder if there might be some merit to allowing ourselves to be held by the wonderful mystery of the love of a man who, though he had proven his ability to conquer death, still stretched out his arms and submitted to death on a cross, in order that he might be lifted up for all people to be drawn to himself. I wonder if we might find that when we let go of the hope of a cure for death, we might find that in the letting go we actually receive the even greater gift of eternal life.

I wonder what would happen, in these last days of Lent, as we wait and watch, as we allow ourselves to feel the tensions of the events that are about to unfold, as we let ourselves wonder once again about the meaning of it all, I wonder what would happen if we entered into this season as those Greeks did so long ago, with one desire: “We wish to see Jesus.”

Maybe instead of trying to make sense of it all, some of us may want to consider making this our prayer for these final days of Lent: “Lord, we want to see Jesus.” What if we asked God to allow us to truly see Jesus with fresh eyes, as we head into Holy Week—less so that we might be able to wrap our minds around these things, and instead so that as we seek to experience these events anew, we might find ourselves being drawn into the greatest love that we have ever known.

Trusting that as we let go of what we think we know, as we let it fall to the ground, in doing so we are trusting ourselves to the One who is able to bring about much fruit—that in letting go of our grasp on the things of this life, we are in fact opening ourselves up to the mysteries of eternal life.

Lord, we want to see Jesus. We long for you to draw us to yourself, even as we find ourselves faced with the mysterious paradox that the path to eternal life must first pass through death; that to gain eternal life we must lose our life. For we remember and we trust that the same Jesus who spoke these words also proclaimed that it is out of Your great love for the world that you gave your Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life. Hold us in the vastness of your love, that we might know our identity as your beloved children more and more. Amen.