We Wish to See Jesus

Sermon for SMHP, Year B, Lent V, March 18, 2018

John 12:20-33

                ²⁰Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. ²¹They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” ²²Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. ²³Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. ²⁴Very truly, I tell you, 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. ²⁵Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. ²⁶Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.

                ²⁷“Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. ²⁸Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” ²⁹The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” ³⁰Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. ³¹Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. ³²And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” ³³He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.

           So the Holy Land is an interesting place to go in a season in which we’ve decided to talk about peace.  Historically, it is the most contested piece of ground in the world, owing mainly to the fact that it is the crossroads between so many of the world’s cultures and nations.  Oh, and religions. 

           Roads to the east and the west pass through Israel and Palestine, as does the only road to Africa, a bridge over the Suez Canal.   

           There is an uneasy peace in the Holy Land right now, though war is never far away.  Our guide took us down a winding road one day…in a charter bus driven by a wonderful man named Ali who has nerves of steel.  At the end of the road was the point at which Israel meets both Jordan and Syria.  Also some Israeli soldiers, whose job it is to keep an eye on Syria and Jordan.  The situation in Syria is dire, he said.  Tens of thousands are dying.  And it’s all happening in plain view of a world which is doing little.

           And that is an old story, isn’t it?

           Throughout history, human beings have been willing to look away from atrocities and horrors in our midst…or just across the border.  We inhabit this very ground because it was wrested from the hands and feet of those who lived here first.  And we aren’t unusual.  Nearly every culture sits upon ground that once belonged to someone else. 

           Here’s something else true of nearly every culture on earth:  its people have claimed faith in a power higher than themselves.  For most of the world today, that’s Yahweh.  2.4 billion people in the world claim Christianity.  Add to that 1.8 billion Muslims and 17 million Jews, and we have a world in which nearly two thirds of the people claim to follow the God of Abraham.  And most of those also claim to follow Jesus.  Jesus.  I’m just gonna leave that there.

           Because…looking around the world today…and our own beloved nation…I gotta ask…what the hell?

           And I mean hell in the cosmological sense.  In the sense in which it appears—not in words but in concept—in our lesson for this morning.

           What the hell?  How is over a third of the world claiming faith in Jesus—you know, the guy who said “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you?”  And “blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”  And we can’t seem to keep from killing each other?

           There were things on our itinerary which I didn’t understand.  Names of towns which have new names.  Jaffa—the biblical Joppa from which Jonah set sail to escape God.  Capher Naum.  Want to guess that one?

           Then there was something called Yad V’shed, during the part of the schedule when we were in Jerusalem for almost a week.  Anybody know what Yad V’shed is?

           It’s the holocaust museum and memorial.  Laid out by an artist, who created a long triangular hallway, with a film playing at the beginning with scenes from life in Jewish communities before the holocaust.  That film plays behind you as you walk along the long triangular hallway of remembrance.  It’s not that long a hallway, and there’s not that much in it, which is puzzling at first.  But the museum isn’t in the straight ahead hall.  It’s in the detours to the side.  In order to get to the end, you have to cut across, from one side to the other, mirroring the path of those who thought they were going one place—a place where they would stay for a while before returning to their homes and their former lives—but ended up somewhere else, a place which can only be described as Satanic.

           By about halfway through, one experiences a longing to go back to the film scenes of happy people, just living their lives.  Each step leads one further along the road to the hell that was Auschwitz and Dachau and Terezin and any of the thousands of camps which held Jews…and gay people, and disabled people, and Romani, and prisoners of all kinds.

           At the end, there is a room, with music playing.  All the way up the long conical ceiling are the faces of people who died in the Holocaust.  One stands, craning one’s neck and trying to understand.

           There is no understanding that horror.  There is no understanding any ideology which determines that innocent people should be sacrificed for the sake of dogma, or territory, or profit.

           Indeed, the horror is the result of a fundamental failure to do just what we did at Yad V’shed:  look up.

           As Ruth Ellen showed us in hir most excellent sermon (http://brigids-cross.blogspot.com/2018/03/sermon-jesus-is-disappointing-snake-god.html) for last week, when Jesus was raised up on the cross, he became the antidote for the world’s evil.  Just as the Israelites in the wilderness gazed upon a serpent on a pole to survive snakebite, gazing up at Jesus on the cross becomes our cure, our true hope.

           On the cross, Jesus absorbed the evil of the world, in a shame not his own, but one he bore on our behalf, in order that we might see it and know the truth, know God’s love, know the way.

           Ruth Ellen said it best at the end of hir sermon:  Because God so loved the world that God gave God’s only son to hang high on a cross for the world to see, and, in seeing, be saved.

           We are saved by Jesus on the cross.  We know that, right?  But there is another element, which John the evangelist makes clear in frustrating repetition from Chapter one to Chapter Twenty-one. 

           We are saved by seeing Jesus.  We are saved by making the request made by some Greeks in our gospel lesson:  “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”

           They wanted to see Jesus.  Jesus the teacher, Jesus the healer.  Jesus the savior of the world.  They wanted to see him, because it is in seeing that we begin to understand.

           It was in seeing Jesus upon the cross that a centurion—a man who bore in his body and in the breastplate he wore the image of empire—that centurion made the first public confession:  “truly this man was the son of God.”

           It is in our seeing Jesus that God is glorified, and the evil of this world is cast out.  “³¹Now is the judgment of this world;” Jesus tells us this day, “now the ruler of this world will be driven out. ³²And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

           Who is the “ruler of this world”?  Satan

           How is he driven out of the world?  When Jesus is lifted up, and draws all people to himself.

           That didn’t happen once, two thousand years ago.  It happens every time we look up and see our Lord, taking the evil of the world into his body on our behalf.  It happens every time we actively seek to see Jesus, and to follow him.

           And we want to see Jesus, right?  Do you want to see Jesus? 

           Holy week comes near.  This is our time to see Jesus and to know him.  When we do that, when we gaze upon him, the evil in this world can be driven out.