Lent 5 B

John 12: 20-33

I'm told that, by a conservative estimate, the message from the Greeks to Philip in Bethsaida that we just heard is written or carved into pulpits in half the mainline churches in this country: Sir, we would see Jesus. It is a reminder of all of us who have the privilege of standing in a pulpit each week of the responsibility we have, to do what we can to make transparent the love of a God with skin on, something to hang onto, in the midst of lives that often don't make very much sense.

I remember going to a funeral some years ago. It was for a man I knew quite well, a devoted father to a daughter and a disabled son, a beloved husband, a senior warden at the church we attended. One Sunday, he walked into the class of grade-schoolers he was teaching, began talking and collapsed before he could finish a sentence. They called an ambulance and rushed him to the hospital, but he died along the way of an aortic aneurysm, a condition that no one, including his wife, knew he had. During the burial, the priest decided to orient his homily toward the man's children, both on the cusp of being teenagers. He knelt down and held up an acorn, asking them if they knew what it was. Shifting their weight and examining their shoes, they mumbled a response. He then asked them what became of the acorn once it was in the ground. After what seemed like half an hour of silence, he supplied the answer for them, that the acorn had to disappear before the oak from which it came could have a chance to grow. He then told them that that was what his father had done during his lifetime, that he had given many people, maybe all the people who knew him, a chance to grow, and the gift of his life was another step in helping all of us become the people God made us to be. There are times when all we want is the comfort of the divine presence when we are without words, speechless before a death that challenges all we feel we know about a just God: Sir, we would see Jesus.

What people seem to want most, especially this time of year, with the divine mystery played out in front of us in slow motion in a week's time, is a reason to see the potential of redemption in our own suffering. In all the losses we experience in our own lives, we feel there has to be a reason why we experience the heartbreak we do. And so we look to the gospel, and there we see a very different picture of the meaning of suffering and death than what many of us have taken in most of our lives. It is not a matter of atoning for our sins, of a God exacting payment on our behalf, but of planting wheat, acres of it, so much that it can feed an entire kingdom.

Nowhere else does Jesus talk more about his own death than in this section of John's gospel, and I think it is because we are all a little dumbfounded by a life ending before we have had a chance to make sense of it. One of our great fears is that our own deaths will leave us unprepared, as our Great Litany says, that our own end will leave those we love groping for words. But no death happens in a vacuum; it happens within the context of a life that affects all those around it.

When Jesus hears about the arrival of the Greeks through Philip and Andrew, the disciples who had been with him since the beginning, he is allowing us to see the death he has predicted for himself through the prism of all he has given the disciples before the long goodbye he will soon offer them. Nowhere is it clearer in John's gospel that the death for which he prepares those closest to him is an extension of the life he has lived, one grounded in conflict with the authorities but shot-through with love for this new world coming into being. It is a death in utter faithfulness to the ministry of the kingdom he has cultivated, one that views his death of one piece with one who heals on the sabbath, gives sight to the blind, and raises the dead. If we would see Jesus, it is in the entirety of his life and death that nurtures the kingdom taking root all around him, a life grounded in the breaking of the power of this world, suffering so that we might see the fruit of a new world ripening before us.

The question is what such seeing does to us. It allows us to view the death of Jesus not as an act of a vengeful God but as a unity of a Father with his beloved Son, the work of a community of the divine drawing us to see differently in a radically altered world. It is like the world that Annie Dillard describes of patients given back their sight after the first cataract surgeries. Some go mad, she says, some refuse to open their eyes, what is before them is so shocking, so disorienting. But there is a twenty-two-year-old girl, so "dazzled by the world's brightness" she "kept her eyes shut for two weeks. When at the end of that time she opened her eyes again, she did not recognize any objects, but, ' the more she now directed her gaze upon everything about her, the more it could be seen how an expression of gratification overspread her features; she repeatedly exclaimed, "How beautiful"'"!

It is into such a world that we step inside the walls of Jerusalem. Once our own eyes clear, we hear a radically transforming idea of suffering, that if a grain falls into the earth and dies, it bears much fruit. It means that our own suffering, the hurt of our neighbor, of those we love, is re-made; in a moment when he glorifies himself and the Father, Jesus gives us a new vision of what a relationship with God and each other looks like from inside the kingdom that is coming into the world.

So the question is not whether we would see Jesus, but on whose terms, that of the world that is passing away or of the one taking root with his death. The fact is that this grain that falls in the coming weeks does so that we might grow with it, that we might see a world transformed by a death that becomes life for all of us. In John's terms, we have a choice, one which all of us have to make. It is the option of looking with mute incomprehension at the violence done to an innocent man who has preached love between his Father and all mankind, or opening our eyes at the fields of grain that he is cultivating in us and around us to say, "How beautiful"!