Lent 5B - "We Would See Jesus"

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Saint John 12:20-33

Before I became the interim pastor of Our Savior Aurora I used to do pulpit supply.

It was great fun meeting other Lutherans and seeing how they worshipped.   Some were pretty by-the-book and straight forward like us.  Some were high church, some were low church, and some even had praise bands.

I know I am literally preaching to the choir here but some of those praise bands left a lot to be desired.  In one of the churches, I visited the band members were as old, or older than I was, and I’m old.   

And the words to one of the songs went exactly like this:

First line: “Yes Lord, yes Lord, yes Lord, yes.”  And the second line was: “Yes Lord, yes Lord, yes Lord, yes.”

I know Lutherans don’t usually do call and response preaching but would you like to guess the words of the third line?  Not surprisingly they were (join in if you’d like) “Yes Lord, yes Lord, yes Lord, yes.”  The concluding line however was a surprise.  It simply said: “Yes, yes, yes.”

This chorus was sung somewhere around 150 times at which point I was tempted to sing: “Please Lord, please Lord, please Lord, please.” And conclude my version with the words: “Stop. Stop. Stop.”

Besides the repetitive shallowness of the song, it stuck me while singing it that people who say yes to everything don’t find themselves nailed to a cross by a paranoid government but become leaders in politics.

How much better the old hymn in the United Methodist Hymnal that puts on the lips of the congregation in song the same request that the Greeks express in today’s gospel: “We would see Jesus.”  This hymn is not just a “yes, yes, yes” but takes us through the whole life and ministry of Jesus from his birth in in a stable, to village life with his parents, to his works of healing, to his death, resurrection and ascension, leading finally to a call to “arise and give ourselves to him.”1

This was not a simple, “Yes, Lord” but a call to follow and it probably wasn’t what the enquiring minds of the Greeks in today’s Gospel were looking for.

Who knows why they were even on the scene.  They could have been serious seekers looking for another philosopher or philosophy or they may have just been tourists.  A few guys who decided to go be a part of the Passover celebration in Jerusalem because they heard it was a place full of energy, excitement, and in anticipation that something just might happen.

Think New Orleans before Mardi Gras or Chicago before Saint Patrick’s Day.  The town was pumped, full of energy. Add to all this there was this Jesus guy who seemed to be causing quite a commotion.  So why not try and see him.  Why not try to discover for themselves what this Jesus was all about.

The always brilliant scholar Debi Thomas brings us more deeply into the scene.

The Gospel doesn’t tell us how many Gentiles come seeking Jesus, or why they’re interested in him.  Are they curious about his message and his parables?  Are they chasing spectacle — hoping to see a rumored miracle-worker walk on water or heal a blind man?  Maybe they’re skeptics or troublemakers, looking to pick a fight with the controversial Messiah.  Or maybe they’re just bored and seeking a distraction.  We don't know.2

 What we do know is that we may not have done much better than Philip and Andrew did when they were first asked. “Sir, we want to see Jesus.”3

Ponder this question for a second. 

If someone asked you to show them Jesus what would you do?  Would you show them a picture?  Would you read scripture? Would you bring them here to Saint Luke?  And, while you walked them around this campus, would you point them to one of the numerous crucifixes, some of them quite graphic, that are placed around the building. 

That seems to be exactly were Jesus goes because without so much as a greeting or even some small talk he launches into a strange little speech about grains of wheat falling to the ground and dying before they can bear fruit.  And stranger still, this little gem: “He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”4

When Jesus finished I’m not so sure if the Greeks didn’t wonder why they wanted to meet Jesus in the first place.  All they may have wanted to do was meet him, shake his hand, perhaps get an autograph but instead they may have been totally confused because this is not the way they thought.

As a matter of fact, it’s not the way anybody thinks!  We are told to love life and live it to the fullest.  We are told to hang on to life at any cost.  And, there are very few, very few people indeed – husband, wife, children, grand-children, partners, maybe even a friend or two – whom we would give our life for but we wouldn’t be willing to give it up for some stranger on the street.

Again Debi Thomas expresses this beautifully when she writes:

I know what it’s like to want Jesus in earnest — to want his presence, his guidance, his example, and his companionship.  I know what it’s like to want — not him, but things from him: safety, health, immunity, ease.  I know what it’s like to want a confrontation — a no-holds-barred opportunity to express my disappointment, my sorrow, my anger, and my bewilderment at who Jesus is compared to who I want him to be. 5

In my own life, I often flinch away from the Jesus of the Passion — the vulnerable, broken Jesus — because I want a muscular, superhero Jesus instead.  I want the dramatic rescue, the quick save.

That’s what we all want says Father Robert Farrar Capon in his book Hunting the Divine Fox.

Our kind of Messiah would come down from a cross. He wouldn’t do a stupid thing like rising from the dead.  He would do a smart think like never dying.6

But that is what we have when we look at Jesus.

While we would love to rush right past the crucifixion, or maybe just make it into something we hang on the walls, or place around our necks, we can’t do that, even as hard as we try.

As one customer was said to have told a clerk in a high end jewellery store when asked what kind of cross she wanted.  “I’ll take one without the man on it.”

That’s an option in a jewelry store but it isn’t one in the life of faith.  If you want to see Jesus, there is no way around it, you have to look at a cross with a man on it.

It is here that we are drawn and gathered to him.  It is here that his overwhelming love comes close and becomes visible.  It is here, on the cross, where we see Jesus showing us a great love that we might not ever be able to grasp or understand, and drawing us, all of us, to himself.

Maybe that is why I cringed when the ancient “praise band” struck up a more weezy than rousing chorus of “Yes lord, yes lord, yes lord, yes” because, of my own accord I wouldn’t say yes to any of this Good Friday/Easter, dying and rising business. 

I’d prefer my crosses not to have a man on them, especially if that man was Jesus.  I’d prefer him to offer the triumph without the tragedy, the rejoicing without the tears, the glory without the gloom.

I would rather see Jesus on my terms rather than his but yet  I know that he “wishes to see me – to see all of us – far more urgently than we’ll ever wish to see him” so much so that he climbed up on a cross to get a good look, to pull us to his self-giving love, which in the end is “stark, holy, strange, and beautiful.”7 

This is Jesus who we see as we walk these closing days of Lent where my deepest desire, and I hope yours, is our wish to see Jesus better than we have ever seen him before.

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1. J. Edgar Park, “We Would See Jesus.” The United Methodist Hymnal. (Nashville, TN: The United Methodist Publishing House, 1989), # 256.

2. Debie Thomas, “Who Are We Looking For?,” Journey with Jesus, March 14, 2021, https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2951-who-are-we-looking-for.

3. St. John 12:20–21. (PHILLIPS) [PHILLIPS=J. B. Phillips, The New Testament in Modern English (London, ENG: Collins, 2009).

4. St. John 12:28. (NRSVUE) [NRSVUE=The New Revised Standard Version. Updated edition]

5. Thomas, loc.cit.

6. Robert Farrar Capon, Hunting the Divine Fox; Images and Mystery in Christian Faith (New York, NY: Seabury Press, 1974), 91.

7. Debie Thomas, “When I Am Lifted Up,” Journey with Jesus, March 11, 2018, https://journeywithjesus.net/essays/1699-when-i-am-lifted-up.