“Sir, we would like to see Jesus.” That’s it, isn’t it? That’s the point, right? That’s why we’re here, why we come to Church, why we say our prayers. We would like to see Jesus. We would like to come to know that God is with us, Emmanuel. We would like to see Jesus cleanse us of this virus the way he cleansed the leper. We would like to place our hand in the hand of the man who calmed the waters, believing he can calm my own troubled soul. We would like to see the healer who can cure my spiritual blindness, my stubborn deafness, my lame attempts to walk the walk of faith. We would like to hear from the teacher who can break open the ordinary stuff of life – seeds growing, bread rising, lost coins — and find in them the very kingdom of God. We would like to feel the forgiveness of a father toward his lost sons… or daughters. We would like to be with the one who can multiply my little bit to make it feed thousands. We would like to see Jesus.
Often that notion is framed as “you need to come to know Jesus personally.” How to do that is not always obvious because we don’t come to know Jesus the same way we know others. Most often we come to know Jesus because we recognize him in a family member, a close friend, a dedicated worker. We feel his presence in Holy Communion or receiving another of the sacraments. We encounter Christ in the silence of our prayer or reading the Bible. Perhaps even seeing a beautiful sunset or a field of flowers will wake us up to the reality of Christ in the providence of our everyday life. Jesus is here right now if we have the eyes to see.
However, a hidden danger lies in our desire, our hunger to come to know Jesus personally. We can all too easily create an image of Jesus in how we would like him to be instead meeting him as he really is. If we are not careful we can become like those who invoke the name of Jesus as they become an invading mob in the halls of government. Jesus becomes a generic excuse for what we want to do instead of the specific person he actually was. That helps to explain the seemingly out of left field response that Jesus makes when Andrew and Philip told Jesus that someone would like to see him. “Unless the grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies it remains just a grain of wheat but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” You can picture the apostles kind of scratching their heads and saying, Does that mean he wants to meet or does that mean he doesn’t want to meet? Jesus makes this seemingly non-sequitur response because he did not want to become a celebrity, a curiosity, a personality. He did not want to walk across someone’s swimming pool to gain attention. Those who wanted to see Jesus would have to meet him not as a superstar mega-messiah but as grain of wheat, as someone who about producing much fruit in others, not in making something of himself. The only way we can really come to know Jesus today is to meet him as he truly was back then: the master who served, the source of life who died, the historical person who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Let’s look at the scripture readings for this Sunday as a way of coming to know Jesus in all his particularity.
First, Jesus is the kind of person who said, “I am troubled now.” The Greek word translated as “troubled” is much stronger. Perturbed, maybe; distressed, okay; agitated, better. It would not be too great a stretch to translate the Greek as “I’m kind of freaking out now.” If we want to see Jesus we must meet him as someone who gets anxious thinking about how things are going. Instead of being above it all, feet hardly touching the ground, Jesus sometimes felt things were crashing all around him. As St. John tells the story Jesus knows that his Heavenly Father is with him but that doesn’t change the feeling of dread that he has when facing the coming struggle and turmoil. We must see Jesus as someone like us whose bedrock confidence in faith does not eliminate the desire to duck and cover.
Second, Jesus is the kind of person who offered “prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears” according to the epistle. Prayer for Jesus was not very zen, dispassionate, stoic. Prayer instead was something that involved all that he was, the whole range of human emotion. Since prayer is about a relationship, communicating with the God who loves us and who we love in return, we should not be surprised to find that the prayer of Jesus would be characterized by bringing all of himself into the moment of prayer. For us to meet Jesus in our prayer requires a similar willingness to bring our whole selves – the good, the bad and the ugly – into the prayerful encounter. There’s an old joke: can I chew gum when I’m praying? Of course not. Well, can I pray when I’m chewing gum. Well, sure. The willingness to be ourselves, just as we are, will join our prayer with that of Jesus.
Finally, Jesus said, “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself.” Ordinarily when we hear of someone being lifted up that sounds positive. Lifted up, elevated, put on a pedestal, exalted. When Jesus says it in this context it refers to his being lifted up on the cross, to “the kind of death he would die.” Jesus lived out the dual meaning of being “lifted up” as a reminder that all things on this side of death have a similar ambiguity. Family is the source of our greatest joy. Family is the source of our deepest heartbreak. Love is what makes life worth living. Love is a constant challenge. All of these scriptural sayings tell us, in order to see Jesus we must look deep within our hearts and find that he has been waiting for us there the whole time.