Lent 5 - Seeing Jesus
"...whatever happens, God will use that as the stuff, the rot, from which new life is formed."
We all would like to see Jesus. It would, we think, make it so much easier to be faithful. But it’s probably the case that we would see what we wanted to see rather than actually seeing Jesus.
The desire to see Jesus was expressed by some Greeks, that is some non-Jews, perhaps unbelievers. Show us this man, this miracle worker. Philip went to Andrew and they both went to Jesus. But Jesus did not go to meet with the Greeks. Instead, he said, “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.”
Some commentators have suggested that Jesus ignored the Greeks’ request or did not respond. But I think that actually he did. He answered that what you see is dying and rising, that what you see is new life growing from old, and that what you see is unexpected fruitfulness extending beyond this life to the next.
That’s what Jesus says we see when we see Jesus. And that dying and rising is the way God makes the world new. The metaphor Jesus uses is from agriculture, but we know he means more than plants.
And Jesus’ dying and rising, God’s creation of new life out of death, is the key to understanding and giving hope to human life. As Jesus also says, ‘“And 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.’ His dying and rising is not just for himself, not just for believers, but for everyone.
I think the rationalists among us, myself included, struggle with the mystical elements of faith. And the seed metaphor seems just too prosaic. But Jesus is telling us that this is what you should see, that God operates in the world in a way that does not simply end in death and decay, but that God creates from the rot of this earth something new that can carry us forward. And it is this very thing that gives us Christians hope in the most hopeless of situations. It’s not that everything will turn out all right. It’s that God will use whatever the situation is to bring new life.
I would like to write the end of the story. I would like everything to turn out the way I want. What God promises is that like new plants emerging from seed, life, by the power of God, will emerge from death. That is what we see when we see Jesus.