John 12:12-36 "Really Seeing Jesus" Scott Hoezee

Some while back I told you about something I often saw while serving as a guest preacher at various churches during my years at Calvin Seminary. In the three years between getting licensed to preach at the Sem and getting ordained in Fremont, I preached at close to fifty West Michigan churches. And so very often when I would enter those pulpits for the first time, I would spy a small bronze plate affixed to one corner of the pulpit and inscribed with the words of John 12:21: "Sir, we would see Jesus." The preacher was the only person who could see this verse printed there but that was just the point: it was the preacher who needed the reminder. It was a reminder that the people in the pews had come not to see you, the preacher, but instead they had come to encounter again the living Christ Jesus. If the preacher made that Jesus large and plain and unmistakable to eyes of faith, then that alone would be the mark of a faithful pastor and a good sermon.

Most weeks I "finish" my sermons by mid-day on Wednesday. I research and exegete texts, riffle through my quote collection, write, re-write, edit, add, delete, read them aloud until I am satisfied that the sermons are as finished as I can make them. Then I hit the "Print" button on the computer, pick up the sheets off the printer tray, and set them aside until early Sunday morning when I'll read through the AM sermon aloud one more time.

But as someone once said, a sermon is never really "finished" until the congregation hears it. Preachers like Pastor Bob and I can only take matters so far on our own. It is finally you all who have the job of finishing a sermon by not just hearing it but by seeing yourselves in the light of the Scripture that is proclaimed. It is in the end you who must see Jesus and, in so seeing the Lord of Life, affirm for the first time (or re-affirm for the thousandth time) that you love and trust him alone.

"Sir, we would see Jesus." It was some Greeks who first said this line. Probably they said it in Greek, too, which is why they approached a disciple who had a Greek name and who had grown up in a town, Bethsaida, that had a mixed population of Jews and Greeks. Maybe these seekers didn't speak Aramaic and so needed to find the one disciple they knew could interpret for them. It is not clear whether these Greek-speaking people were Jewish converts or Gentiles who had come to Jerusalem to take in the Passover sights and sounds. But whoever they were, they had heard of Jesus and wanted a formal introduction.

That hardly made them unique at that precise moment, however. Jesus was rumored to have recently raised a man named Lazarus from the dead. The man had been moldering in a tomb for four days already when this rabbi from Nazareth reportedly called him out of that grave. Indeed, John's gospel presents the New Testament's single most understated account of the Triumphal Entry. John has abridged and streamlined this story, leaving out most of what you can find in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This entry was an important event to be sure, but in John the recent raising of Lazarus looms much larger, including for these Greek strangers. They simply must see the man who could do what Jesus recently did.

So they make their request to Philip, who in turn pulls his brother Andrew into the action as well. The two of them then go to Jesus and ask him, "Lord, do you have a minute? Some Greek tourists want your autograph or something." But it is just here where the story makes an odd turn. There is no indication that Jesus paid much attention to Philip or Andrew; no indication he ever meets the very people who first said, "Sir, we would see Jesus." Indeed, there is a quirky irony that in verse 21 there is a request to see Jesus and yet in verse 36, we are told that Jesus hid himself from those Greeks and everyone else--indeed, in John's gospel Jesus will not appear in public again until he does so nailed to a cross.

Why would Jesus hide? Why would he duck away from some earnest seekers? Because Jesus' "hour" had come. It is the hour, the time, for the Son of Man to be glorified, which probably sounded good to the disciples. As John admits in a number of parenthetical insertions in these chapters, at the time these events were happening, the disciples understood very, very little about who Jesus really was. In fact, in just a little while, in John 14, Jesus will say something to Philip that could apply equally well to any one of the disciples: "Have I been with you so long and still you do not know me?" Indeed, they did not.

The disciples saw Jesus' colorful entry into Jerusalem not as the beginning of the end for their Master but as the long-awaited beginning of the very political fame, power, and glory they had been hoping for. I also don't doubt that when some foreign folks asked about Jesus, Philip and Andrew thought it was a fantastic sign that things were finally starting to go their way. In verse 19 the Pharisees lament, "The whole world is going after this Jesus now!" Having heard from these Greek folks, Philip and Andrew no doubt wanted to say, "You bet the whole world is on our side now! Even Greek folks want our Lord!"

So they rush to Jesus to give him this good news only to hear Jesus say, "My hour has come." And I can almost see the disciples standing around Jesus, eagerly rubbing their hands together, grinning like Cheshire cats, and thinking, "Yes indeedy! This is the moment we've been waiting for!" But wait a minute! Jesus did not stop with talking about his hour arriving at last. Now he's talking about death, about a kernel of wheat falling to the ground and dying. Then Jesus says something that seems calculated to alienate the eager crowds, not whip them up: if you love your life, you'll lose it. But if you lose your life (in a way similar to how Jesus seems ready to lose his own life), then you'll find it back again.

No sooner does Jesus lob that solemn thought into the crowd like a verbal grenade and he says, "My heart is troubled." Troubled!? Jesus is supposed to be happy! Palm Sunday is supposed to be happy, too, isn't it? Well, yes and no. Yes, today is a glad day because we mark once more yet another step that Jesus took toward our salvation. But in John 12 Jesus alone seems to know which direction his steps are taking him, and it is straight toward a cross. Considering what Jesus will soon suffer, Palm Sunday cannot be "happy" in the sense of being all sweetness and light, a flashy parade and shouted "Hosannas."

Palm Sunday is a doorway we pass through so that we can enter the Holy Week that is now before us. This is not, and should not be, a single bright spot of razzle-dazzle in the midst of the otherwise dim season of Lent. Palm Sunday is not a break from Lent but a part of Lent, and if we forget that and so try to use this day as a chance to take a breather from the heaviness of Lent, then we may find that Jesus will hide himself from us, too!

The Gospel of John does not mention the Garden of Gethsemane. Maybe the evangelist John knew that there were already three other gospels circulating in the early church and that each of them already told that important story. So perhaps John crafted his gospel to be a bit different so that certain truths could be made easier to see. For John, the entire agony of Jesus in Gethsemane gets boiled down and condensed into just verse 27. But the punch of it all still comes through: Jesus is tempted to ask his Father to deliver him, spare him from what is to come. Jesus wants to say, "Father, save me." But if he had said that, then the rest of us would not be saved. That was Jesus' choice: save his own hide or save everyone else. He could not do both.

"Is there anything God can't do," our children sometimes ask us. Our pious answer often goes something like, "No, honey, God is so strong and mighty, he can do anything." The philosophers among us would probably point out that this answer is technically off-the-mark. Even God, they say, must be consistent with logic. God cannot make a square circle, a married bachelor, or a chair that is not a chair. More theologically minded folks might add that God also cannot will himself out of existence since God, by definition, must exist--existing is what it means to be God, after all.

But neither these philosophical nor theological speculations come near the heart of the gospel. Because if we want to ask "Is there anything God cannot do?" in connection with salvation, then there is one bracing answer we must not forget: God, as the incarnate man Jesus, cannot both save himself from the cross and still also save the rest of us. To accomplish the salvation for which God sent his Son into the world in the first place, Jesus had to die. Yes, he would be glorified, as the Father's thunderous voice from heaven in verse 28 promises. But not without the suffering, anguish, grief, and finally also the death that is to come.

Well, the crowds didn't like this one bit (and neither did the disciples, as subsequent chapters in John will make abundantly clear). "Hold up there a sec," they all shout in verse 34, "we've always been taught that when Messiah showed up, he'd remain with us forever. So what's all this talk about death and departures? Do you want to be the Christ or don't you? Because if you do, you'd best start playing along with our political dreams, Jesus!"

In reply Jesus says something about light and darkness, something I'm sure not one person in ten understood. And no sooner does Jesus, the Light of the world, say this, and he hides himself. As I mentioned to the young people at last month's youth service, we were taught as children to sing, "This little light of mine . . . hide it under a bushel? No!" But in John 12 Jesus, who is the light, does hide it under a bushel. He does so not because he doesn't want anyone to come to his light but because he doesn't want anyone trying to come into the light before passing through the darkness of the week to come.

So far as we know, the Greeks who asked to see Jesus never did. It's another one of those delicious ironies. A few weeks ago we noted that Nicodemus was the first person ever to hear the most famous verse in the world: John 3:16. But we're never told how he reacted to it! The first person ever to hear what is now the most utilized of all evangelism texts may or may not have been converted by virtue of hearing that text: we don't know. And so also in John 12: the first people to utter what has become the well-known preaching slogan, "Sir, we would see Jesus," quite probably never did see him that day!

But suppose a few days later those same Greeks passed by that scarecrow figure impaled on a spit of wood at Skull Hill. Jesus couldn't hide himself from anyone that day. He was on public display, literally nailed down at last. Conversely, however, Jesus could not go to anyone himself, either. You had to come to him that day if you wanted to see him. The question is: would anyone bother, would anyone dare, could anyone stomach the sight? "When I am lifted up, I will draw all people to myself," Jesus predicted in verse 32. Just in case we were tempted to think that this "lifting up" meant the glory of Easter or the Ascension or something, John inserts his own voice into the text once again in verse 33 to remind us that it was his raw and hideous death Jesus was referring to there.

Jesus would draw all people to himself on that cross, but would anyone come? Would anyone let themselves be drawn, or would they hide their faces, turn aside, run away, look for someone else who appeared to be going somewhere worth following? "Sir, we would see Jesus" the Greeks said to Philip. In a way, everything Jesus said in verses 23-36 was an extended answer to that request, as though Jesus were saying to these Greeks, "It's OK that you want to see me, but wait a few days. I invite you to come and see me Friday afternoon. You won't be able to miss me. You'll know me when you see me. I'll be the suffering and dying one. But I hope you'll come by to see me anyway."

On Friday, the question is not whether we can see Jesus, but whether the Jesus we see is one we are still willing to follow through the death and darkness of what our sin brought about. A week ago this morning I was standing at Ground Zero in New York City. I wasn't alone as a number of people were also somberly gazing at that vast sixteen-acre zone of destruction. It was one of the saddest places I've ever been. About twenty minutes after arriving, that sense of sorrow was magnified as we silently watched an honor guard remove the remains of yet another firefighter from the wreckage of the south tower.

Why do we go to places like Ground Zero? Why don't we simply hide our faces from death? Because somehow we cannot. We cannot deny death's presence, even its inevitability. And when death concentrates itself in a single area where thousands died one bright September morning, the pull to see, to pay respects, to look becomes even stronger.

There is a church right next to Ground Zero, one which amazingly survived the carnage of 9/11. The wrought-iron fence surrounding this church has become one long memorial wall, covered over with thousands of messages from children who lost their daddy, spouses who lost their mate, parents who lost their children, ordinary New Yorkers who lost fellow citizens. A good many of the pictures drawn by children (and even a few put there by adults) contain drawings showing Jesus standing over the burning twin towers. Under ordinary circumstances, some of these renderings would be things I'd call theologically a bit cheesy, but the pain there is too raw to despise anything that hurting people put there.

We think Palm Sunday is a day for children to wave palm branches, be happy, and sing, and insofar as that is part of this day's worship, that is fine. But there are other children in recent months who have hailed Jesus not with palm branches as he rode on a donkey's colt but with tears as the children looked to a crucified Jesus who maybe offers some hope even in the midst of something like the devastation in Lower Manhattan.

We are drawn to death sometimes, especially to concentrated places of death: Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor, Nazi concentration camps, Oklahoma City, Ground Zero. We need to remember. But Jesus draws us to his own terrible death because somehow, by the wonder of God's grace, every death that has ever happened was concentrated into that single cross. But the cross is no memorial to what once was but has passed away. We come to the cross again Friday not to pay our respects, to recall what was lost, to weep over what can never be again. No, we come not just to remember but to remember and believe. We come to believe that in this death is the final end of death and the triumph of God's Life.

Last Sunday evening my wife and I experienced one of those New York moments when, on a whim, we ducked into St. Patrick's Cathedral only to stumble onto a concert by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. The very end of the concert was a candlelight memorial to the victims of September 11 through the music and words of Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus: Ave verum Corpus, natum de Maria Virgine: vere passum immolatum in cruce pro homine: Cuius latus performatum fluxit aqua et sanguine: esto nobis praegustatum, mortis in examine. O Iesu dulcis! O Iesu pie! O Iesu Fili Mariae. Amen. "Hail, true body, truly born of the virgin Mary mild. Truly offered, wracked and torn, On the cross for all defiled. >From whose love-pierced, sacred side, flowed the water and the blood. Be a foretaste unto me, in my death's agony. O gentle Jesus! O Jesus sweet, Mary's Son, Amen."

Having begun the day last Sunday in the face of so much terrible death, it was a blessing for my wife and me to end the day in gospel hope. But just that is the blessing of the gospel, if only we allow Jesus to draw us to himself when he is lifted up on the cross. "Sir, we would see Jesus." So would we all. This week let us follow. Let us follow and not turn back; follow and not turn aside. For then we will see--we will see as only children of the light can. Amen.