HOMILY DELIVERED BY
THE REVEREND DR. HAROLD T. LEWIS, RECTOR
CALVARY EPISCOPAL CHURCH, PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
ON THE FIFTH SUNDAY IN LENT
2 APRIL 2006

 

"Sir, we wish to see Jesus." (John 12:21)

 

 

Most of us, from time to time, are approached by our friends --- or even passing acquaintances --- who ask us if we would function as an intermediary between them and somebody famous or important. People ask me, for example, if I would put in a good word for them to Archbishop Tutu or his successor, Archbishop Ndungane. And my jock friends, after they get over the shock of learning that I am good friends with Dwight White, unabashedly ask if I could possibly procure an autograph --- presumably for their child or grandchild (but I wonder). In 1969, after my first year in seminary, I spent the summer in England doing clinical pastoral education at a mental hospital there, and my bishop dispatched me with letters of introduction to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and the Dean of Westminster. I took my letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury to his London residence, presented it with my card, and behold! Three days later I received an invitation from Archbishop Ramsay's chaplain summoning me to Lambeth Palace! (As you can see, having "played the palace" at an early age, my symptoms of delusion of grandeur are not of recent origin.)

 

In today's Gospel, we see the who-you-know game at work. Some Greeks had come to Jerusalem to worship. They are eager to meet Jesus. News of his most spectacular miracle, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, was being circulated around the countryside, and these Greeks, known for their keen intellect and inquiring minds ("who want to know") want to make the acquaintance of this miracle-worker, prophet and preacher. But these Hellenic visitors, aware of Jesus' renown, reason that their chances of meeting him were somewhere between slim and none, so they elect to approach him through an intermediary, one of the disciples. But they did not choose just any disciple. They chose Philip, one of the two disciples with a Greek name. They figured Philip would take care of his homeboys and provide an entrée to the Master.

 

But Philip, as we have observed recently, wasn't long on self-confidence. He considered himself a junior partner at best, so he passes the request on to Andrew, the other disciple with a Greek name, and together, they convey the Greeks' request to Jesus. And just as Michael Ramsey, the hundredth archbishop of Canterbury deigned to grant an audience to a seminarian of no consequence from Brooklyn, New York, so did our Lord Jesus Christ grant an audience --- of sorts, to the inquiring Greeks.

 

But there was one difference. I was elated, honored, and transfixed by my audience. Michael Ramsey, in his voluminous purple cassock, was larger than life, with eyebrows even bushier than those of a certain local lesser prelate! Although we engaged in only a few minutes of small talk, that archiepiscopal conversation was, to me, impressionable Anglophile that I was --- did I say was? --- the Discourse of the Century! But the Greeks must have been disappointed with their audience. They expected to be ushered into the presence of royalty. They expected a glorious, majestic personage. They were ready to bow and scrape, to bask in the presence of greatness, to hang onto Jesus' every word! Jesus, at long last, would, through these Greek seekers, reveal his glory to the Gentiles. This is a Cecil B. DeMille moment. Lights, action, camera! Jesus' announcement only enhances their expectation: "The hour has come," he proclaims, "for the Son of God to be glorified." How would that happen? asked the Greeks to themselves. Some great theophany? Some sound and light show? Surely it would be an event at least as dramatic as the Transfiguration. But no, Jesus describes his glory like this: "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies it bears much fruit."

 

"Excuse me?" gasp the Greeks. "We couldn't have heard it right. Jesus must have got his signals crossed. This is not at all what we expected." But Jesus, clearly, knew exactly what he was talking about. He can't flub these lines; these are the words of his last public discourse recorded by John. You see, we praise God as the glorious one who is high, exalted, and lifted up. But Jesus speaks of divine glory as a seed falling to earth, dying. Jesus' glory is not in his exaltation, it is in his humiliation. "Although he was a Son," the Epistle to the Hebrews reminds us, "he learned obedience through what he suffered." Or as St. Paul instructs the Philippians: "The divine nature was his from the first; yet he did not think to snatch at equality with God, but made himself nothing, assuming the nature of a slave. Bearing the human likeness, revealed in human shape, he humbled himself, and in obedience accepted even death -- death on a cross."

 

Do we wish to see Jesus? If we do, we must be willing to accept a few paradoxical guidelines. First, if we wish to see Jesus, we must understand that we will achieve life through death. And I think you know me and my theology well enough to know that I am not preaching a pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by religion. I am not suggesting for a moment, that you must wait to die and go to heaven, in order to cash in on all the goodies. No, our Lord said "You shall have life and have it abundantly," and I think that he had in mind life on earth as well as life in heaven. No, you don't have to die a physical death. But you do have to die to self. "He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life." When we are caught up in our own sense of importance; when we subscribe to a belief in the unholy trinity of me, myself and I, we court disaster. It is when we open ourselves to the needs of others, it is when we exercise a servant ministry, that we begin to find the meaning of life.

 

"Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die," Jesus says. This is the way a seed sprouts. It loses its identity and then comes really alive. Jesus would prove this once and for all on Calvary, but suggests that in our earthly pilgrimage, we must be about the business (in the words of yet another one of he rector's favorite hymns they took out of the Hymnal) of "toiling up new Calvaries ever, with the cross that turns not back."

 

Do we wish to see Jesus? If we do, we must understand that we will achieve gain through loss. Did you remember the words of Isaac Watts' beautiful hymn? "My richest gain I count but loss/ and pour contempt on all my pride." Those words too often fall on the deaf ears of a microwave society that wants instant results, instant returns on our emotional as well as financial investments.

 

Do we wish to see Jesus? If we do, we must understand that we will achieve victory through defeat. How often have experienced a tremendous disappointment, a devastating blow, only to discover later that the Lord who closed a door then opens a window?

 

Sometimes we never see Jesus, we never meet Jesus, and sometimes even the church herself seems to keep us at a distance from him. There is a story about a newly-minted priest who spent the first few months of his ministry straightening out all the heresy and bad beliefs he had found among his people. He transcribed his seminary notes into pedantic sermons, expounding on this and that theology, this and that doctrine of the Atonement, and the latest news about the Dead Sea Scrolls. Finally, a member of the altar guild was dispatched to the pulpit just before the service, where she placed a sign on top of his sermon, which simply said, "Sir, we wish to see Jesus."

 

Sometimes the church provides us with a mode for escape, in which we get so tied up and distracted in our personal devotions that we lose sight of the object of that devotion: Eighty years ago, a famous Anglo-Catholic bishop warned his congregation: "You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the Tabernacle, if you do not pity Jesus in the slums. . . It is folly -- it is madness -- to suppose that you can worship Jesus in the Sacraments and Jesus on the throne of glory, when you are sweating him in the souls and bodies of his children."

 

We all seek our personal Jesus. The Greeks wanted a philosopher, others a magician, still others an emperor. Some today, believing that they were made in God's image, wish to return the compliment, and fashion Jesus into a warmonger, a misogynist, a racist or a homophobe. Let's just take Jesus at his word: "Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also." We must be willing, then, to find Jesus in a trench in the Iraqi war as well as in a trough in Bethlehem, in a garbage dump in a South American barrio as well as on the Mount of Olives, in a crack house as well as this beautiful house of prayer.

 

Let us pray:
O shame to us who rest content while lust and greed for gain,
In street and shop and tenement wring gold from human pain,
And bitter lips in blind despair cry, "Christ hath died in vain."

Give us, O God, the strength to build the city that hath stood
Too long a dream, whose laws are love, whose crown is servanthood,
And where the sun that shineth is God's grace for human good. (The Hymnal 1982, 582)
Amen.