Lent 5B
21 Mar 2021
“We want to see Jesus.”
Philip must have been flummoxed and had no clue what to do with that request; he passed in on up the chain of command and then when Jesus spoke it seemed to have nothing to do with the request. We never do find out if Jesus spoke to the Greeks or what sort of reaction they had if they did see him. Maybe it was just like a bridge in a musical composition, a way to get us from one place to another.
I don’t know about you, but I am really curious what or who they thought they would find. If they did get close enough to hear, they would have heard this very strange monologue about seeds dying in order to bear fruit and, once again, the need to lose one’s own life for the sake of eternal life.
A Greek would have been puzzled, since the Greek concept of a great teacher was one who had a grasp of philosophy and rhetoric, a philosopher and not the son of God. Yet they had heard of Jesus, as had so many who were there.
You knew, if you were in the crowd, that this was the person who had raised Lazarus from the dead and who had been entertained lavishly by Mary and Martha, and even anointed with the costliest perfume by Mary herself.
But what would you see, really, if you saw Jesus? You would see God!! Seeing Jesus, seeing the “signs”, the miracles, whatever you wish to call them, was in fact seeing the nature of God. God made God’s own self known to you in a way that you could wrap your head around. Pretty plain, yes?? Maybe you were one of the locals who knew Mary and Martha and Lazarus and had been there when he came from the tomb. It would be hard not to see Jesus for what he was, but you would now need to wrap your head around the idea that he was going to die in some horrible fashion, yet the death was not death but the way to life. Very hard stuff to understand then and just as hard for us to take fully into our hearts and minds today. We can say the words; we can probably recite an entire Eucharist with only a few glances at the Book of Common Prayer to make sure we have the Prayers of the People right. The rest has be-come hard wired. And that is a danger, a big danger for us. You drive the same route every day, know when to slow down for a curve, know where all the stops and bumps and hazards are and then suddenly one day there is a detour. You have to start thinking all over again.
Lent and Holy Week are those times when it might be a very good idea to deliberately take another route. We want to see Jesus!! We are not going to see him when we drive in a fugue state.
I took a new look at Jesus these past days, looking at him through my lens as a priest. I have been trying to figure out just what it means to be one, as opposed to a pastor or preacher or “the rev”. I finally saw someone write the words that said what I just could not quite articulate: being a priest means putting yourself in the breach. The times I actually function in that capacity, as opposed to one who proclaims, the preacher, or one who walks with others, the pastor, are the times I stand between you and God. Thinking about that rather frightened me. I am not a particularly braver person and to know that what we called sacerdotal duties is standing in the breach. What if I fall?
Yet this is what Hebrews is trying to tell us: Jesus is that great high priest, the one who stood in the breach and who knowing-ly made the ultimate sacrifice so that all of us could live. The priests of the temple made sacrifice on behalf of all the people, for only the priests were so worthy, but God changed all of that with Jesus.
Listen to this line:
“God reconciled Godself to humanity not by denying the suffering of the world, but by entering into it. Jesus does not skip and laugh on his way to the cross- his “soul is troubled”- yes God (not Jesus) is glorified.” Pulpit Fiction commentary on the Gospel reading for Lent5B.
Jesus knows now that the time has come. All the signs, the anointing my Mary, and now the Passover and with it the crowds. Do they get it? Do we get it? Sometimes I think I am just starting to grasp it, but when asked to explain it I fumble for words. It is like a plastic bag that once upon a time got away from me in a huge meadow on a windy Iowa spring day. Just when I thought I had caught up to it and made a grab, the wind took it farther away.
How do you explain a God who enters the world and says, look, I am one of you? The Greeks who asked to see Jesus: what was their idea? As I said, maybe they were looking for a wise philosopher. Maybe they were looking for the great high priest who made sacrifices to the gods. Or maybe John was trying to tell us something astounding. You see Jesus and you see what God is like. The great high priest is the one who be-comes not only the connection between humanity and God, but the lightening rod that carries all the sorrows and sins of the world and grinds them up. The sacrifice and the person making the sacrifice are one and the same. God is the Passover lamb. Not because humanity is completely hopeless; if that were the case God could pull another flood disaster or send more poisonous serpents like happened in the book of Numbers.
Instead God sees our frailties, our weaknesses and loves us for them. God also points out our wrongdoings, which for us in this time and place include the sins of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and the failure to care for creation. For this Jesus is willing to die and his sacrifice is like the seed that falls to the earth, but when it dies as a seed, it is reborn in abundant life.
The ruler of the world as we know it will “be thrown out”. Did the people who were listening think it meant the Romans would be defeated? Maybe; but if that was all that Jesus stood for there would be no reason for Christianity to exist. The Ro-mans did not leave when Jesus died, but the world was changed forever.
I believe we are still throwing out the ruler of the world. It is a process that at times seems like Sisyphus rolling the stone up the hill for all eternity. But we have hope; the hope founded on the promise, the hard promise, of the Gospel that Jesus came to show us the way.
I have no idea how long I will stand in the breach. I have no idea how long I will need to speak out and write letters and demonstrate. I have no illusions that I will stumble and fall at times and at other times do the wrong thing, take the wrong turn, but I will try to pick myself back up and keep going. I sus
pect my work, like the work of all Christians for 2000 years, will in no way be over when my earthly life ends.
But I tell you that I have seen Jesus and I do know the way. It is a way we can all travel together.
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