This was a busy weekend at St. Peter Lutheran Church! On Saturday, we welcomed Victoria Flood from the ELCA’s Churchwide office in Chicago, and on Sunday we celebrated the baptism of Case Frerichs. All three services also included dedicating 328 quilts!
The readings for this fifth Sunday in Lent of year B are Jeremiah 31:31-34 and John 12:20-33.
Karoline Lewis had a good reflection on WorkingPreacher.com on seeing Jesus that I found helpful.
Today’s Gospel begins with a deceptively simple request. There are some people who want to see Jesus.
Since they’re Greek, though, they’re not sure this Jewish rabbi will want to see them, so they start by going up to Philip and asking him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” In the verse right before our reading, the Pharisees were complaining about the whole world going after Jesus. These Greeks prove their point.
As it turns out, Philip is the only apostle with a Greek name, not Hebrew, so it makes sense for these Greek inquirers to see him as the most approachable. A couple years ago when Christin and I were in Tanzania with a group from Wartburg Seminary, we had something similar happen.
If you were here last week, you met Tawanda Murinda here leading worship. He was a first-year student on the trip with us, and as he may have mentioned, he’s from Zimbabwe.
Well, as it happened, our group consisted of Christin, myself, four other white people, and Tawanda. Over and over, people in Tanzania would approach our group and start talking to Tawanda, assuming because he was black, he was the most approachable and would understand Swahili.
Not a bad assumption, but Zimbabweans speak Shona, not Swahili, so he couldn’t understand them either.
But it makes sense for these Greeks to start with the person they think will be most approachable. So, they come to Philip and ask to see Jesus, and he goes to Andrew—who apparently would have been the right one to ask—and then they go together to ask Jesus.
Oddly, that’s the last we hear about these Greeks. But their impulse is correct. Wanting to see Jesus is always right. In John, seeing Jesus means more than just glancing at him with your eyes; it means having a relationship. They don’t want to just learn about him, or just vaguely know he’s there, they want to actually be in the presence of God.
Isn’t that what we want too? We’re here today because we want to see Jesus…right? Of course, they don’t completely understand what that means…and neither do we.
When Jesus hears their request, he announces, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”
The hour has come. This is something new. This is a turning point in John’s story of Jesus. Earlier, not just once, but three separate times, John’s readers have been told Jesus’ time has not yet come. That’s why he was reluctant to do his first miracle of turning water into wine at the Cana wedding. It’s also why the authority’s previous attempts to silence Jesus had failed.
Now, Jesus says, the hour has come. This is it. Everyone is going to get to see God’s glory revealed in Jesus, although it won’t be in the way anyone expects. Everything from here on out leads to the cross, and as John’s gospel makes clear, Jesus knows it. The voice from heaven confirms it. Jesus is doing the Father’s will. We know it, but the disciples and the crowd of people standing there still don’t get it. They think maybe it’s an angel, or maybe just some thunder. They don’t understand who they’re seeing.
It’s often hard to see God working in the moment. Maybe that’s because God works in such strange ways, because God has a strange idea of glory. Jesus is among us here today, as we’re gathered as Christ’s body. Anytime the church is gathered, even if there are only two people, Jesus promises to be present.
But so often, it’s hard to see God’s presence, to see Jesus among us. I mean, look around. We’re just normal people. We don’t look like the kind of people who should be trusted with the best news in the world. God’s glory rarely looks like the kind of earthly glory we expect.
That’s where the Holy Spirit comes in. It takes the eyes of faith to recognize Jesus, because we don’t usually get a thunderous voice from the heavens to let us know He’s here. (Although, in this story, a thunderous voice doesn’t seem to help much.)
Instead, Jesus is present among us in much more ordinary ways—ordinary ways that are at the same time much more strange. Bread and wine. The water we’ll splash on Case Frerich’s head tomorrow morning and the words we’ll pray over him as he’s baptized, welcomed into the church and claimed forever as a child of God.
Jesus is present whenever we reach out to bless others, whether that’s showing up at a funeral to give comfort to a grieving family, sending a card to someone who’s sick, or inviting someone in need of good news to come and see what Easter is all about.
We trust Jesus is present when we pray for each other and for our world. Jesus is present in all these quilts. We see Jesus, and we pray that the world sees Jesus through the work we do as a church, both here in Greene and as we just heard about, through what we do with our money through our wider church.
Of course, even those examples are the kind of glory we can understand. The idea of seeing Jesus in good works makes some sense to us. What Jesus says in this reading is even more unexpected. He compares his glory to a grain of wheat falling into the earth and dying. God’s glory is revealed in death and suffering.
Martin Luther called this idea a theology of the cross, rather than a theology of glory. There is no situation that’s too hopeless for God to be present. As we talk about at funerals, because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, we know even death does not stop God’s love for us. When we truly see Jesus, we realize he’s present in even the worst parts of life. God brings new life out of death.
In the last few weeks, we’ve talked about covenants quite a bit, from God’s covenant with Noah to not flood the earth again, to the covenant with Abraham to make a great nation even when it seems impossible, and the covenant with Israel to be their God who gives them laws to follow to set them free.
Now, as we approach the end of Lent, we hear this reading from Jeremiah. God promises to make a new covenant, not like the old ones that the people broke, but a new covenant of grace and forgiveness, where God’s law is not something external to be followed, but something written directly on our hearts.
The hour has come. God is doing a new thing. For the people of Israel in exile who first heard of this new covenant, it meant God was restoring their land, making them a nation again. For us as Christians, we recognize the new thing God is doing is entering into creation in the person of Jesus Christ.
God enters into the brokenness of our world to give us life. God chooses to be born as a frail little baby in a humble home in a backwater village to save the world. Out of Jesus’ death comes life for the world.
Jesus will be glorified, but his glory will look like defeat, like death on a cross. His glory is in his giving himself up for you and me, out of love. Defeat comes before victory. Whether they know it or not, this is the story those Greeks wanted to get involved with. This is the Savior they wanted to see.
This week, I invite you to reflect on what it means to follow a God whose victory comes through defeat, a God who enters into all of life.
And may the peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Amen