5 Lent – March 17, 2024
John 12:20-33
“Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” The setting is Jerusalem, the occasion is Passover, and the people making the request are Gentiles, visiting the city for its traditional religious festivities.
“Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” It sounds so simple. A straightforward request. But is it, really? Is it ever? Maybe it’s one of those questions that asks more than we could ever realize. Perhaps it’s an example of “be careful what you wish for.”
Do we really want the real Jesus? Which Jesus is it that we want? And why?
Do we want the miracle worker who turned water into wine and raised Lazarus from the dead? Do we want the story teller whose parables simultaneously revealed and obscured? How about the political provocateur who debated Roman taxes but welcomed Roman tax collectors, who blessed the peace makers and also welcomed a Roman soldier? The renegade rabbi who violated purity laws, broke the sabbath, embraced the sexually suspicious, ate with ethnic outsiders, and who profaned Israel’s most sacred space, the temple?
And another point – the Jesus of John, chapter 12, is a deeply disturbed man. “Now my soul is troubled,” he says. But he doesn’t ask God to save him from his suffering. He says that his troubles are the very reason he came.
“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. I tell you the truth, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. The person who loves his life will lose it, while the one who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am my servant will also be. My Father will honor the one who serves me.”
This saying of Jesus takes us to the heart of Lent and the deepest meaning of the gospel. It was so central to his mission and message that all four gospels include it (and twice in Luke).
My friend speaks of a family picnic. “We went out to one of these lovely state parks; and the water was so blue green, as it is around here on the high mountain streams. The water came tumbling down that white waterfall, and it came into this deep, green pool of water. There was a great rock formation that came out into the middle of that deep green pool. Obviously, this was a great swimming hole. And so just as we were getting ready to dive into that swimming hole of cold water, I noticed a huge salmon, a whole bunch of huge salmon, lumbering along the bottom, slowly, ever so slowly, their noses worn white from the long trip up this mountain river, their bellies and backs were colored black. They had traveled literally hundreds of miles to that swimming hole to spawn. For a half an hour, we watched these old hogs, as the fisherman fondly call them, old hogs lumbering like logs along the bottom, swirling, preparing to die. ….. You know the stories about the instincts of salmon. A salmon has an instinct inside of it to bring it back to the place of its birth. After spending a year or two or three out in the ocean and swimming thousands of miles back up to the stream of their birth, the salmon are preparing to die. They finally at the end of their long laborious journey, dig a hole, lay their eggs and they die. And out of those eggs comes new life. For it is through dying that there is new life among the salmon.
It is in dying that we begin living. St. Francis of Assisi knew this well when he wrote in his famous prayer for peace; “it is in giving that we receive; it is in dying that we are born again.” There is a spiritual principle at work in this: it is only in dying that a person begins to live. But what does it mean to die?
Jesus talks about dying to self. It means dying to selfishness. It means dying to “the big I,” the old Adam, the attitude that I am going to live for me, the purpose of my life is my self-fulfillment and me experiencing all that life can give me. Life is preoccupied with me and my happiness; I am preoccupied with myself, my successes, my failures, and what other people are thinking about me; that I am the center of the universe. That’s what an infant believes; that the infant is actually the center of the universe and everything revolves around the infant’s needs. And many of us grow up but remain infants; still believing that we are the center of the universe. We never grow up but experience being paralyzed by self-centeredness. But when life revolves around me, I am not really living at all. When that childish self-centeredness finally begins to die, finally I begin to live.
Jesus said, “Unless a seed dies, it remains only one seed; but if it dies, it produces many seeds and seedlings of little love which then grow into great love.”
It is not only our childish self-centeredness that needs to die but also our sinfulness. Our sins that hurt us and others around us. It is when our sinfulness dies, that we are healthier and better.
For example, a colleague shares this story : a person called me recently and told me about being with their father in the midst of death. Father, age 51, cancer, down to 95 pounds. And there on that Sunday afternoon, rubbing her father’s back with oil. The joy, the pleasure, the satisfaction of touching and caring for her father. How wonderful Sunday was, and how awful Monday was when he died. But it wasn’t that long before that this young woman was healed of her addiction, so that she was free and able to take care of her father in death. There on that Sunday afternoon, she was free, free to love and care and focus on the needs of her father, not being paralyzed by her addictions. There would have been no living with her father in his closing moments of life if there hadn’t been dying, dying of her addiction.
Each one of us struggles with our own sinfulness. I have mine and you have yours. And it is only as your personal sinfulness dies daily that you begin to live. And we can see Jesus.
As Debi Thomas shares: Jesus’s longing for us is the ground upon which all of our desire — however abundant or stingy — rests. Jesus wishes to see me — to see all of us — far more urgently than we’ll ever wish to see him. This isn’t a rebuke. It isn’t an invitation to self-loathing or shame. It is a promise and a refuge. We love because he loves first. We love because the cross draws us towards love — its power is as compelling as it is mysterious. The cross pulls us towards God and towards each other, a vast and complicated gathering place. Whether or not I want to see Jesus, here he is, drawing me. This is the solid ground we stand on. Stark, holy, strange, and beautiful.
“Sir, we wish to see Jesus” The real Jesus. The Jesus of abundant life and love. Amen.
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